“For the past two years, the Silverton Flying Sled Dog Races hasn’t been able to catch a break, but event organizers are confident conditions will be just right this winter to hold the competition for the first time,” reports The Durango Herald. “The first year the event was planned, 2017, there was too much snow. A storm dumped on the San Juan Mountains the day before the race, creating risky avalanche conditions on Molas Pass, where the race was to be held. In 2018, there wasn’t enough snow. A record drought year left the track too bare to safely run the dogs. The event, which was planned for January, was moved to February in the hopes conditions would change. But snow never arrived, and the race was ultimately canceled. This year, event organizers are optimistic the race on the weekend of Jan. 12-13 will be a go.”

“Construction firms in Colorado expect to do more work this year than last, even as they continue to struggle with worker shortages that are delaying projects and driving up costs, according to a construction outlook survey released Wednesday by the Associated General Contractors of America,” reports The Denver Post. “The markets where Colorado contractors said they expect to see an increase in dollar volume compared to last year are education, water infrastructure, public buildings, private offices, federal projects and transportation, not including highways. The construction industry employed 170,900 people in the state in November, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The average hourly wage earned by construction workers was $30.10, up from $28.34 in 2017.”

The post The Home Front: New images from the Kuiper Belt <h3 class='secondary-title'>Your daily roundup of the biggest stories from newspapers across Colorado</h3> appeared first on The Colorado Independent.

“Crime and corruption, troubled schools, drug epidemics, natural disasters — the news deals with some pretty discouraging subjects. But it doesn’t have to be negative. In recent years, a movement for ‘solutions-oriented journalism’ that highlights promising responses to social challenges has picked up steam. The Solutions Journalism Network, one of the leading advocates for the approach, has trained newsrooms around the country. And earlier this year, the network launched ‘Small Towns, Big Change,’ a partnership with seven local newsrooms in southern Colorado and New Mexico designed to bring solutions journalism to smaller communities in the rural Mountain West.”

That was a lede I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review three years ago that seems to have aged well enough.

This week, an initiative that began as a pilot project on our state’s southern border in 2016 is expanding — in a big way. With a half-million-dollar grant for one year, the LOR Foundation and the Solutions Journalism Network have now launched the Mountain West News Partnership, a regional network of newsrooms that will “co-report and share stories, exchange best practices and challenges, and participate in local and regional in-person events.”

I caught up with LaMonte Guillory of the LOR Foundation over the phone this week. He said the pilot project worked so well on the Colorado-New Mexico border that they wanted to scale it up. “Of the stories that were produced through this pilot, [solutions-based stories] were the most read, most shared, most time spent on page,” he said. Guillory knows the time commitment for journalists producing solutions-oriented stories versus a “headline grabber” is significant, so newsrooms are faced with whether they want to expend the necessary resources. The grant money could help mitigate that.

“We don’t know how the 50-plus newsrooms are going to work out from a regional perspective, but we find that it’s an important one to at least test out,” Guillory said, adding he hopes the Mountain West News Partnership can wind up serving as a model.

The newsrooms include a dozen in New Mexico, 13 in Montana, five in Idaho, and three in Wyoming.

Colorado newsrooms participating in the Mountain West News Partnership so far include KRZA public radio in Alamosa, Aspen Journalism, Boulder Weekly, KDNK in Carbondale, KSJD in the Four Corners, KBUT in Crested Butte, Colorado Public Radio, The Colorado Sun, The Durango Herald, The Coloradoan in Fort Collins, The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, KUNC, The Gunnison County Times, High Country News, KVNF in Paonia, KOTO, The Mountain Independent in Telluride, and the Rocky Mountain Community Radio network.

Support for the Mountain West News Partnership also comes from Montana’s Kendeda Fund and the New Mexico Local News Fund. Also involved is Report For America, which recently announced locations where its 2019 crop of reporters will deploy. Out here in the Mountain West, they’ll drop into four newsrooms in Wyoming, two in Utah, two in Idaho, and two in New Mexico. (None in Colorado, incidentally.)

If you’re curious about what “solutions journalism” actually looks like (and how to write a solutions story without it coming off as a puff piece), listen to this podcast I recorded with some of the members of that 2016 pilot project in our neck of the woods. In it, J.R. Logan of Taos News, who called himself “proudly podunk,” said his work with the Solutions Journalism Network changed the way he approached his work. “When you say the word ‘solution’ you can feel the tension in the interview room drop,” he said. “Some of these people are sources that I’ve talked to in the past that I have written very critical stories about and who are always wary to get a call from me. And the mood is totally different when you say ‘I want to help find a solution, the story is looking for a solution.’ Everyone takes a breath. And that’s been true of every story I’ve written for this project.”

Talking about navigating potential conflicts if certain solutions they’re reporting about might be tied up with foundations funding the journalism work, Leah Todd of the SJN said that happened early in the project when she found out late into the reporting process that the LOR Foundation was a funder for a subject in a story she was covering. “I wrote about this story without interference from the funder,” she said. “I was totally free as a reporter to investigate what I wanted to look into and talk to who I wanted to talk to … it was no different, I’m saying, than any other story I’ve done.”

To read more about this kind of approach, you can read this just-published case study about how The Durango Herald “partnered with several organizations to use a solutions journalism approach to covering youth suicide, a sensitive subject that the publication had received criticism for in past coverage.”

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel: ‘Get your bias here!’

Following the departure of this Western Slope newspaper’s managing editor, the paper has a new one, Dale Shrull, who has launched a new editorial feature called “Miscellaneous.” The section will focus on items that “don’t require a full-blown news story, but still deserve answers.” In its write-up about the section, the paper’s editorial page tackled a problem of perception among some readers. From the Sentinel:

Some readers seem to think that anything that doesn’t conform to their political views is “biased.” We’re nobody’s echo chamber. If the Sentinel only published pro-Trump or anti-Trump columns or cartoons all the time, critics might have a case for bias. But we don’t do that. We try to present a diverse array of opinions so readers can decide for themselves which arguments stick. We seem to get as many complaints about being too conservative as being too liberal, which we take to mean that we’re right where we should be. If you aren’t upset with your local newspaper’s opinion page at least half the time, either we aren’t doing our job or you aren’t paying attention. … It’s our job to stir the local intellectual soup. There’s no hidden agenda with regard to selecting columns, letters and cartoons. Our goal is simply to shove people out of their comfort zones. Whatever your political views are, or whatever reason you pick up the Sentinel, thank you for reading and thanks for your feedback.

The editorial, which also cites this newsletter, ran under the headline “Get your bias here!”

The Denver revolution will be … digitized 

That was the essence of an in-depth feature story in this month’s 5280 magazine by Boulder freelance writer Michael Behar that takes a look at the world of online journalism in the Mile High City. The headline: “Are We Witnessing a Digital News Revolution in Denver?” Much of the story will be familiar to readers of this newsletter, focusing on three outlets with different business models: the nonprofit Colorado Independent, the for-profit Denverite (recently bought by Colorado Public Radio) and the public-benefit corporation Colorado Sun. The story comes three years after a 5280 feature by a different writer titled “How Massive Cuts Have Remade The Denver Post.” (And that was before The Great Bloodletting of 2018.)

Some nuggets from the latest piece, with notes:

• “The Independent has been around since 2006; Denverite and the Sun are less than five years old. And yet it’s still next to impossible to surmise just how successful any of them really are, or will be. (My take: We’re in the Big Shakeout decade where everyone is trying everything to see what business model might work to replace dwindling subscriptions and disrupted display and digital advertising to make money while attracting readership.)
• “Nobody I spoke with for this article is interested in trying to make digital advertising a primary source of revenue,” the author writes.
• “Ryckman declined to provide hard numbers for the Sun, though he did say that more than 22,000 people subscribe to the Sun’s four email newsletters and that it has “thousands of paying members overall.” Greene says the number of donors to the Independent has grown exponentially each year. “We have 2,074 individual donors, plus several foundations supporting our work,” she says. “As for our reach, we’ll share those numbers if and when our competitors share theirs.” (My take: For some digital outlets, compare it to ranchers who don’t want other ranchers to know their cattle count, or maybe politicians who don’t want you to see their tax returns. Perhaps they’d rather not unnecessarily help the competition or maybe they’re embarrassed by something in there. Eric Anderson of the Denver SE2 communications firm has used a data analytics program to try and get a sense of the reach of these outlets and posted about it.)
• “…the Denver Post averages 122,150 individual paid subscribers for its weekday print and digital content combined and 200,539 for its Sunday edition … so although the conventional wisdom is that the Post is on life support, it appears to be drawing significantly more verified readers than Colorado’s newest news organizations.” (My take: Its digital reach is likely far and away larger than any digital news site in the state. In 2017, the Post reached 5.68 million unique visitors in the month of March, according to numbers from comScore, and reached “more unique visitors who live in the Denver market than any other major media outlet.” In march of this year, that number was 6.4 million unique views.)
• “What remains unclear is whether collaboration will be enough to keep the upstarts afloat. Former Post staffers now helm the Sun, the Independent, and Denverite, which makes one wonder, given all the talk of teamwork, why they didn’t band together in the first place.” (My take: I’ve wondered that, too, especially with the Sun/Independent.)
• “For his part, Ryckman cites differing missions. ‘The Independent wears their politics very much on their sleeve,’ he says.” (My take: I think that’s a kind of dated view, unless he’s talking about what the columnists write about.)

For more plugged-in media industry junkies, though, it’s this graf in the story that’s likely to get the most tongues wagging and heads shaking in Denver:

Ryckman pitched his boss—the Post’s editor, Lee Ann Colacioppo—a story about Krieger’s dismissal. She rejected the idea, Ryckman says, claiming that Boulder wasn’t in the Post’s domain. The Boulder City Council subsequently approved a declaration urging Alden to support full editorial independence of the Camera. This time, Ryckman asked Colacioppo to run the Camera’s piece on the council’s decision. “ ‘This feels like news to me,’ I told her,” Ryckman says. “She said, ‘If it were Denver City Council, yes, but not Boulder.’ So I showed her a half-dozen examples of stories just the previous month that we’d picked up from the Daily Camera about the [Boulder] City Council.” Plunkett agreed with Ryckman; he wrote a follow-up editorial about Krieger, which the Post’s publisher spiked, and Plunkett quit over it. Colacioppo finally agreed to let Ryckman author a piece about Plunkett’s resignation. But Ryckman says Colacioppo insisted that he leave any mention of Alden out of the article. “Never in my career had I been told to take facts out of a story for some nonjournalism reason,” Ryckman says. (In response to a request for comment, Colacioppo wrote: “Larry is obsessed with these moments. It may have been all Larry had to think about at the time, but I had more important things on my mind then and now. As a result, the details and nuances of those discussions are lost to me.”) The Post published the piece on May 3, 2018. The next day, Ryckman resigned, along with Dana Coffield, the Post’s senior editor for news.

Do read the whole piece, though.

A Colorado newspaper was banned from reporting in a national park

Officials at Mesa Verde National Park denied a Colorado newspaper’s request to report on a roundup of “trespass” horses on federal land. From The Cortez Journal:

Other horse roundups on federal land have included public and media viewing areas, and courts have ruled that media have a First Amendment right to witness federal government activities. Park Superintendent Cliff Spencer banned media coverage of the roundup in an email April 24, stating that roundup representatives informed him they did not want anyone not involved in the roundup to be present because “the distraction would negatively affect the behavior of horses.”

First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg wrote a letter to Spencer, in which he said: “Accommodating a single reporter and pool photographer for a limited period of time at a considerable distance from the wrangler-horse interactions is a constitutionally appropriate way to protect the public’s First Amendment right to access a National Park and to engage in protected newsgathering activities there.”

Read more about the dispute here.

The budget blade slices into CSU-Pueblo’s journalism program

In the euphemistic terminology for people losing their jobs, Colorado State University at Pueblo is undergoing a “25-position reduction in staff.” One of those affected by the budget cuts is Joanne Gula, an assistant professor in the college’s mass communications program, whose job is going poof. The school’s president, Tim Mottet, defended the cuts in The Pueblo Chieftain, saying students wouldn’t be impacted.

From the Chieftain:

Mottet said that enrollment has been declining in mass communications over the past few years. “The dean and the provost are going to be working with an external consultant to re-examine the academic programming taking place in mass communications,” Mottet said. “We are going to develop a new plan moving forward that we think is going to reflect where mass communications is today.” Mottet said the curriculum needs to be assessed in the department. “When your enrollment is dropping at that rate that is a sign that we need to go back and re-evaluate what’s going on.”

The paper reported Gula saying three other faculty members in the mass communications department are also losing their jobs and all four are women. “This is basically half of the mass communications department,” Gula told in the Chieftain. “What happens to the students?” She said some of them have been crying, sending emails, wondering how they’ll be able to earn a diploma.

Kara Mason, the immediate past president of the regional Society of Professional Journalists who writes for The Aurora Sentinel, PULP in Pueblo and ColoradoPolitics, graduated from CSU-Pueblo’s journalism program in 2015.

“I loved my experience at CSU-Pueblo for the most part. The classes were small and there really seemed to be a focus on learning basic skills,” she told me about her experience. “We would sit at these large conference tables for classes — instead of traditional classrooms — and it really felt like an editorial meeting, and that our professors were really part of the learning process that we’d eventually experience in the real world. I’m disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be an emphasis on helping preserve and expand the program. There are ample opportunities to partner in the community, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anybody in the department willing to put it together. I’m thankful for CSU-Pueblo’s program, but without the connections I made outside of the classroom — and I felt I was often navigating those waters alone — I’m not sure I’d even still be in journalism. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like with even fewer resources.”

Family-owned Colorado newspaper sold to out-of-state company

After more than three decades as a family-owned newspaper, The Delta County Independent has been sold by the Sutherland family to the Arizona-based Wick Communications. From The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:

Wick Communications also owns the Montrose Daily Press, which was acquired in the 1990s. The Delta County Independent and Montrose Daily Press are both 137 years old, established in 1883. “We are thankful that the Wicks are the kind of company that could come in and keep that community focus. They have a proven track record,” Randy Sunderland said. Montrose Daily Press publisher Dennis Anderson, a Delta High School graduate and a current Delta resident, will also serve as the publisher of the Delta County Independent.

The terms of the deal are not public.

Colorado could pass an anti-SLAPP law that could be good for some newsrooms

In the mad scramble toward the end of this year’s legislative session, the first in years where Democrats controlled the House, Senate and the governorship, one proposed law that’s advancing could potentially shield individuals — and newsrooms — from spending time and money defending lawsuits aimed at trying to shut them up. From the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition:

House Bill 19-1324 would add Colorado to a list of nearly 30 states with anti-SLAPP statutes that provide a process for the early dismissal of civil cases filed against people who are exercising their First Amendment rights of free speech or freedom to petition the government.

SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” Interestingly enough, the term, writes the CFOIC’s Jeffrey Roberts, was “coined in the 1980s by two University of Denver law professors.” The proposed new law, “modeled after California’s anti-SLAPP law, establishes an expedited court process in which a defendant in a civil action can file a special motion to dismiss the case based on an assertion that the lawsuit arose from the exercising of his or her constitutional right of petition or free speech.”

In 2015 I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review about how the Golden State’s anti-SLAPP statute helped a nonprofit news site prevail in court. Lately, there are some in Colorado who worry our state is becoming too much like California. In this regard, though, I think I’ll take it.

One of the sponsors of the bill is Lisa Cutter, a first-year lawmaker. At the beginning of this year’s legislative session as part of its Capitol Sunlight project explaining how state government works, The Colorado Sun profiled Cutter’s rise from the sidelines to the Women’s March and to the legislature. Now, as the session closes, Sun reporter John Frank profiled her again for the project in a story that puts a human face on how legislation is sponsored and shepherded through (or gets jammed up) at the Capitol. (An additional nugget from that story: “In a meeting room in a legislative office building, the lawmakers gather with lobbyists and the Polis administration to get an answer to a key question: Does the administration support this idea? The exact response is unknown because a lobbyist asked The Sun to leave, even though it qualified as a public meeting under Colorado law.”)

Colorado Public Radio will move its newsroom to downtown Denver

The public radio behemoth is moving its reporting team out of Centennial and into the heart of Colorado’s capital city. From the announcement:

When complete, the 9,000 square foot newsroom and studios will accommodate 70 reporters and producers, including the daily production of the statewide news program, Colorado Matters. Initially, nearly 50 reporters, producers, editors and digital news staff – about a third of Colorado Public Radio’s total staff and all of Denverite’s staff – will relocate to a 9,000 square foot office space at 303 E. 17th Avenue. The organization will continue to operate its primary business, including both CPR Classical and CPR’s OpenAir, from Bridges Broadcast Center in Centennial.

“We’ve outgrown that space with plans for continued growth,” CPR’s executive editor Kevin Dale said in a statement about the move. “Moving downtown is a desirable option to add space, while also reducing operational challenges we face being a half-hour away from the state’s largest news hub.”

An update on the Waltons and the Colorado River 

In a recent newsletter, we looked at the Walton Family Foundation and its funding of news outlets that cover the Colorado River, highlighting a Boulder Weekly piece questioning that arrangement. Now, E&E News reporter Jeremy Jacobs is out with a two-part series on the Walmart heirs and funding from The Walton Family Foundation’s focus on the river.

From the first installment:

The foundation’s reach is dizzying and, outside the basin, has received scant attention. It has funded environmental groups (Environmental Defense Fund: $5.55 million since 2017, National Audubon Society: $2.6 million, Trout Unlimited: $2.7 million), university research (Yale University: $60,000, Stanford University: $98,000, Utah State University: $150,000), even journalists (KUNC, a community radio station for northern Colorado: $155,000). Earlier this month, the University of Colorado, Boulder, announced a journalism “water desk.” Its funder: Walton ($700,000). The Walton money has fueled symposiums, conferences and pilot projects up and down the river to establish “proof points” for conservation programs.

The piece points out two dueling narratives (read the story to see what they are) about the high-financing influence, summed up at the end by Anne Castle, a former Obama-era assistant secretary of Interior for water and science. “I think both of them are true,” she said. “They are doing a lot of good … But in doing good, they have become part of the establishment. It seems to me that conservation groups aren’t as willing to question the way things are running. It pushes them toward the status quo.” (The second installment is here.)

As if to underscore the point about Wally World’s Colorado River water funding focus, the E&E News series carries this disclosure at the end: “Reporter Jeremy P. Jacobs was a 2018 Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow on the Colorado River, which was largely funded by the Walton Family Foundation.”

Personnel file and weekly Colorado newsroom HR report

Kerry Leary, who served as the first producer of the innovative KUSA 9News TV show “Next,” took a segment producer job at MSNBC and starts at 30 Rock in New York City this month.

Mike Brohard (best sports journalist name ever?) has left The Loveland Reporter-Herald after a quarter-century for a communications role at Colorado State University. From the write-up about it at CSU: “A Colorado native, Brohard has been sports editor at the Loveland Reporter-Herald since 2001 and has covered Colorado State Athletics longer than any reporter in the market. He began working for the paper as a sports writer in 1992 and was promoted to assistant sports editor in 1996. Brohard has been the beat reporter for CSU football since 2002 and for CSU volleyball since 2012, and has written numerous feature stories on CSU Athletics in his 27-year tenure with the newspaper.”

On old typewriters and those who repair them

“With a wince, Raymond related how the late gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson, using a shotgun, blasted apart an IBM Selectric that he had worked diligently to maintain over the years. To this day, he can’t bear to look at the famous photo of Thompson standing in the snow aiming at the helpless typewriter.”

That’s from an evocative must-read story by Nancy Lofholm for The Sun that had one hell of a headline and lede about typewriter repairman Darwin Raymond of Raymond’s Office Machines & Supplies in Glenwood Springs. “It’s a dying art we are in,” one of his Colorado counterparts told the writer with a sigh.

The hedge fund that controls Media News Group, née Digital First Media — also known as The Nothing, and for gutting newsrooms like The Denver Post — has lost a battle in its company’s attempted “hostile takeover bid” of Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. This clash of the media titans is important for Colorado because MNG owns a dozen newspapers here and Gannett owns The Coloradoan in Fort Collins.

On May 16, the day of a high-finance proxy battle board seat vote, the hedge fund uncharacteristically bent the knee, sending out an email to employees, which included journalists. “The proxy contest has ended today and we want to directly communicate to the MNG organization that although we did not prevail we will continue to pursue the addition of other newspaper publishing properties as circumstances present themselves,” wrote Alden Global Capital Chairman Joseph Fuchs and Vice Chairman Heath Freeman.

Here’s how the the Alden-company-controlled Bay Area News Group reported on this media-world Game of Thrones:

MNG made an unsolicited, $1.4 billion bid to take over Gannett Co. in January, announcing it had acquired approximately 7.5 percent of Gannett Co.’s outstanding shares. Gannett Co. rejected the initial bid, and the process evolved into a proxy fight, with MNG putting forward six candidates to replace Gannett directors — a slate that MNG eventually cut in half. But Gannett Co., the owner of USA Today and more than 100 daily newspapers, announced Thursday that it had retained control of its board of directors with shareholders re-electing all eight Gannett-backed nominees and rejecting all three nominees put forward by MNG.

And here’s how the Gannett-owned USA Today played the news:

Gannett shareholders voted to reject MNG Enterprises’ board nominees, siding with the USA TODAY owner as it attempts to fend off a hostile takeover bid by the hedge fund-controlled newspaper company. Gannett chairman J. Jeffry Louis announced Thursday that the company’s shareholders backed the eight board members who stood for reelection, according to preliminary results of the vote. The three nominees proposed by Alden Global Capital’s MNG Enterprises failed to gain seats on the board.

So what now? It’s “just a hiccup” says industry analyst Ken Doctor, who believes murders and executions — (excuse me) — mergers and acquisitions are still ahead for the big newspaper companies. He put this skirmish in the context of a larger newspaper industry war, one where GateHouse, House McClatchy, and House Tribune all still fly banners outside their walls.

Print advertising remains down double digits across the industry, and digital advertising — even if you include “marketing services” — is newly weakened in the face of Google and Facebook’s 77 percent share of local digital ad revenue. “It’s been growing for six years,” one top revenue exec told me this week. “This year, it’s struggling.” Local digital subscription revenue is the one operational area the industry looks to for growth.

As Tribune continues to assess who it wants to sell to, or buy, or merge with — McClatchy continues its search for a partner. And, as I noted a month ago, even GateHouse — the past few years’ go-go acquirer, amassing 145 titles — is now reassessing its own strategies. Those plans haven’t turned the company around. Will it remain a standalone company (known formally as New Media Investments, Inc.)? Or will it participate in a grand industry rollup that some have prophesied for years? … If we do see big mergers, who will run the companies that result, with what strategies? And — big question — will they have enough capital to execute on their vision of a digital transformation?

By “grand industry rollup,” he means consolidation— one house taking over another house to be ruled under one king. So, when winter comes, who will it be, and who — or how many — will go the route of Sansa Stark?

A father-son TV news rivalry comes to Denver

Famed TV journalist Tim Russert didn’t live long enough to see his son Luke join NBC as a congressional reporter. But even if he had they would have worked for the same network. Here in Denver, a well-known TV news dad is getting to see his son follow him as a reporter on the screen — but for a rival station.

After two years at WBIR in Knoxville, Marc Sallinger is moving back to Colorado, where he used to live, and is taking a job at KUSA 9News, the city’s NBC affiliate. There, he’ll compete against his father Rick Sallinger, who works for Denver’s CBS4 News.

It is with great pride I can now report that my son Marc will soon be working as a reporter on Denver TV at KUSA. pic.twitter.com/gcAXBD9ObP

— Rick Sallinger (@ricksallinger) May 18, 2019

That’s my dad but he’s also the competition now

— Marc Sallinger (@MarcWBIR) May 17, 2019

Onward to the scoops. And family dinners.

More on police scanner encryption in Colorado

Earlier this year, my colleague Jonathan Peters, the press freedom correspondent for Columbia Journalism Review, reported how encryption efforts were challenging journalists who cover crime in Colorado. “More than two-dozen law enforcement agencies statewide have encrypted all of their radio communications, not just those related to surveillance or a special or sensitive operation,” he wrote. “That means journalists and others can’t listen in using a scanner or smartphone app to learn about routine police calls.”

A month later, he was not encouraged by plans in Denver to encrypt all of the police department’s radio traffic and give access to it to select media that sign some kind of agreement with the city.

The issue bubbled up again in a city council meeting in Longmont last week when police told local government officials why they think the encryption practice works and would like to continue it. “They said police officers have been concerned for years that those who commit crimes listen to the department’s radio traffic to determine officers’ locations,” reported The Longmont Times-Call. The Times-Call and other local media, however, “were provided a scanner to listen to encrypted radio traffic,” the paper reported. Longmont Observer has a write-up and video from the city council hearing here.

Has your newsroom been affected by this practice in Colorado? If so, let me know.

You cool with this? 

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs secretly photographed students to create a dataset “funded by U.S. intelligence and military agencies” to “advance facial recognition technology” and turned over the images to “government agencies and corporations.”

From The Colorado Springs Independent:

Back in 2012, [UCCS professor] Terrance Boult attached a camera to a building on the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs campus and began filming oblivious students that passed by it. The images, collected on 20 days between February 2012 and September 2013, were of over 1,700 people completely unaware they were being watched.  …

Once the images were collected, Boult and his students began the arduous process of sorting them, often relying on the regularity of class schedules to identify the same subject in multiple shots. Each little collection showed a single person, but wearing a variety of clothes and with their face at various angles. Together, the photos created a dataset known as Unconstrained College Students — the latest, and perhaps most advanced, dataset for training facial recognition algorithms, surveillance tools that are under development by corporations and governments across the world. …

…Boult points out that there’s nothing illegal about taking photos of people in public. And First Amendment Attorney Steve Zansberg, of Denver’s Ballard Spahr LLP, agrees — though he says that some of the applications of the photos could possibly give rise to legal challenges, especially when government is collecting that data. Still, this is largely uncharted territory. …

Boult says that he tries to balance ethical privacy concerns in his work. For instance, he waited until all the students in his dataset would have graduated before making it available to government agencies and corporations, and none of the people in the dataset are named. Those using the dataset, released in 2017, had to sign a legal agreement and could not release individual photos.

Read the full story here.

Speaking of surveillance…

“Pueblo police are using drones extensively.” That was a recent headline from The Pueblo Chieftain about the southern Colorado city’s “seven officers who have been trained to operate the drones that have become beneficial in police investigations.”

From the story:

In a separate situation, an officer spotted a man wanted on multiple warrants escape from a home, but a drone was able to help that officer locate the suspect hiding several blocks away. Once the drone spotted the suspect, police were able to move to the area in which he was hiding and apprehend him, [an officer] said.

“They have enough technology in them that you can take off and let it hover and maneuver it wherever you want,” the officer told the newspaper. “It’s almost like a PlayStation controller. We hook our phones up to it and it’s run off an app you can use to look at the cameras from the drones. It provides all your air speed information, altitude information. And the larger drone has a traffic alert, so if you have a helicopter coming in the area, it will alert you to that.”

What you missed on the Sunday front pages across Colorado

The Greeley Tribune found out an officer wasn’t wearing a body camera the night she shot and killed another off-duty officer after a car chase. The Longmont Times-Call reported on a new research paper at CU Boulder “that found methane emissions from drilling haven’t made large increases despite big boosts in energy production across the country over a decade.” The Steamboat Pilot wrote about the kinds of items that ended up recycled on a local recycling drop-off day. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel had a big takeout on why business in the small town of Fruita is booming. The Loveland Reporter-Herald explored how local charter schools are looking to add officers in the wake of the STEM school shooting. The Gazette in Colorado Springs reported how mentally ill inmates are “starved for care.” The Coloradoan in Fort Collins wrote about a MAX bus transit expansion. The Boulder Daily Camera reported the death of a man who fell 100 feet in Eldorado Canyon. The Denver Post painted a picture of Gov. Jared Polis’s first months in office. The Durango Herald reported how people are still digging out avalanches in some places.

The machine learning ‘unconference’ recap

I wasn’t able to attend The Colorado Media Project’s recent “unconference” on machine learning at the University of Denver, but CMP’s Alan Gottlieb has a recap about what folks learned. Journalists from Vermont to Florida showed up, along with journalists from The Colorado Independent, Longmont Observer, Chalkbeat, 5280, Vail Daily, The Colorado Sun, and Colorado Public Radio.

From the write-up:

One scheduled session focused on planning for a fall Migrahack, which will take place September 27 & 28. Migrahack will bring together journalists, academics, developers, data scientists and immigration experts to work together to bring to the public contextualized, compelling information on one of the most divisive issues of our time. Visit the organizing website here: https://portfolio.du.edu/migrahackco.

Read the rest here.

John Ferrugia of RMPBS updated the nation on the STEM school shooting

Rocky Mountain PBS news anchor and managing editor John Ferrugia appeared on PBS Newshour with Judy Woodruff, giving the nation the lay of the land following the latest school shooting in Colorado.

RMPBS, based in Denver, recently produced “Beyond Columbine,” an in-depth look at “the national impact Columbine has had – not only on our school children, but for victims of other gun violence, in the realm of mental health, and on our art and culture.”

Colorado post-session political narrative

With the legislative session over, public affairs coverage is likely to shift more toward politics than policy. So what’s going on? A narrative is building of a Colorado Republican Party fracture over a grassroots effort to recall a newly elected Democratic House member, Tom Sullivan, whose son Alex was killed in the Aurora theater shooting because Tom Sullivan voted for the red-flag gun law on which he campaigned. Storylines pit the hardcore gun rights group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners against more established Republicans. No better time to revisit this incredible 2013 profile of RMGO leader Dudley Brown in 5280 magazine. Do read it; you’ll be glad you did. Meanwhile, a new group of moderate Republicans has formed to try and rebrand their party after November’s blue wave swept them out of office up and down ballots and deep into the counties. ColoradoPolitics reporter Marianne Goodland offered somewhat of an update to that faction’s influence on the party (for good or ill) in a cover story for the weekly print edition.

On the Democratic side, journalists are giving our new governor, Jared Polis, a report card after his first legislative session. Writing in The Denver Post, in its news section (not opinion), Nic Garcia reported Polis is “a libertarian after all.” The story looks at six things we learned about Polis since voters elected him in November. Writing in Westword, Chase Woodruff, who said he planned to vote for Polis before the election, penned a recent story outlining how some activists wonder what happened to the “bold progressive” on the campaign trail once he took office. Woodruff also found Polis is “a regular on link-sharing site Reddit, where he frequently posts articles and comments on forums like r/Neoliberal and r/Libertarian.” With “a few exceptions,” Woodruff notes, “Polis’s makeover as a ‘bold progressive’ and GOP hysteria about his ‘radical and extreme’ agenda informed the bulk of the media’s coverage of the 2018 governor’s race.” He also smartly points out, “With the legislature adjourned until next January, the locus of state policymaking now shifts to the sprawling executive branch that Polis oversees, giving the freshman governor more direct control than he often enjoyed during the first four months of his term.”

As always, keep an eye on The Colorado Sun’s ever-updated Jared Polis promise tracker, which, frankly, could be a useful model for other news outlets across the nation following an election of a new chief executive. Speaking of The Colorado Sun, the outlet, which is experimenting with a more data-driven approach to political reporting, did something different for its Polis report card.

Innovative: The @ColoradoSun created an interactive scorecard that rates the legislative achievements of Colorado's new governor based on nearly three dozen proposals in his State of the State address: https://t.co/nRK5jZ0Xqh pic.twitter.com/dVGy4Phnuu

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) May 23, 2019

The scorecard is also informed by “interviews with dozens of state officials, lawmakers and advocacy organizations.”

“Isn’t this America, after all? Well, not exactly; it’s Colorado.”

Brutal quote. Who said it? Steve Zansberg, the First Amendment attorney who represents news outlets in Colorado. What’s the context? A judge in the school-shooting case keeping secret a whole bunch of information surrounding the case because, well, because it’s Colorado so she can do that. Zansberg told Eugene Volokh for Reason magazine that he expected his phone might be ringing off the hook when reporters learned “the entire court file in [this] murder case is ‘suppressed’ from public inspection.”

From the piece:

And yet … I’ve received not a single call, or email, from anyone (other than Professor Volokh) asking how this could be the case.

Isn’t this America, after all? Well, not exactly; it’s Colorado.

You may recall that last year, our State Supreme Court issued a ruling saying that in this state—unlike all others—the public enjoys no presumptive right, under the federal or state constitution, to inspect records on file in courts of law. Trial judges, like Theresa Slade in Douglas County District Court, who is presiding over the Erickson murder case, have been given essentially unfettered “discretion” to seal their court files. And, (with our State Supreme Court’s blessing), they don’t need to articulate any reason beyond “there are countervailing considerations” to justify their denying the public’s ability to monitor the conduct of judges, prosecutors and other officers of the court.

Perhaps, Zansberg went on, “in these cash-strapped times, members of the news media cannot afford to fight battles of principle that are ‘almost certainly a losing cause.’ And, who knows, there is a chance the court file, or some portions of it, may be unsealed when [one of the suspects] next appears in court on June 7. Perhaps.”

Last semester, Zansberg visited one of my journalism classes where he told students that in 1996, “We couldn’t lose an open records case,” but, more recently, it’s been hard to win one. Judges, man.

Across the state, Coloradans are feeling what it’s like with daily life on low-power mode.

The governor shuttered dining at bars and restaurants for a month; theaters, gyms, and casinos are kaput. The legislature temporarily adjourned. Ski resorts closed. Schools shut down. Grocery stores slashed hours (and started hiring). People are panic-buying guns. Churches canceled mass; professors learned to teach online; public defenders tried to spring clients as prisons prepare. Conference organizers scrapped major events like the Broadmoor’s Space Symposium and Denver’s 4/20 fest. Some people who live in homes held their first family meetings. Some people experiencing homelessness scrambled for a plan. Sunday’s front page of the Daily Camera newspaper seemed to sum up so much of life around us right now: “Boulder’s heartbeat a murmur during state of emergency.”

UPDATE: (WEEK II): ‘We are not immune’: COVID-19 layoffs hit Colorado newsrooms

Initially, some newspapers with subscription content lifted their online paywalls for COVID-19 coverage, but later opened all stories or told readers about loopholes they could use to view them for free. “All urgent health alerts are in front”—of a paywall, meaning accessible to non-subscribers— “but we need your support to do our work,” Denver Post editor Lee Ann Colacioppo tweeted March 16. “Please consider subscribing — it starts at just 99 cents. Another option is to download our app where all content is available unmetered for a short time.” (The Post’s decision got a shout-out from the governor.) ColoradoPolitics is also letting readers view its virus coverage for free.

At KRCC in Colorado Springs, radio journalists practicing social distancing “is resulting in some very difficult decisions for on air programming,” the station’s programming manager Jeff Bieri wrote to members.

Elsewhere on TV, in print, online, and over the radio, journalists kept their audiences informed about what the president has called an “invisible enemy” and how confronting it is, our governor said, like “chasing a ghost.”

The Colorado Sun has a rolling interactive map of COVID-19 cases in the state and is also tracking unemployment claims. Chalkbeat created a map of where kids can get meals while schools are closed (also helpfully translated into Spanish). Readers, listeners, and viewers were looking for answers, and news outlets responded. The Denver Post set up an FAQ page and is soliciting questions. In Colorado Springs, KRDO hosted an hourlong Q-and-A TV special with public health experts and took questions from viewers. Vail Daily held a webinar with its sister papers in Aspen and elsewhere. First Draft News published a resource for journalists covering the coronavirus. Some news outlets are watchdogging institutions. “The Broadmoor closes restaurant dining rooms after KRDO investigation,” read a headline in the Springs. The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition put out a guide to Colorado’s Sunshine Laws as public officials “think about how they can do the public’s business virtually without violating the Colorado Open Meetings Law.” The words “Coronavirus” or “COVID-19” — often accompanied by that red deteriorating-clown-nose-looking graphic— took over the home pages of news sites like PULP in Pueblo, and outlets from Westword to Colorado Public Radio added dedicated verticals to virus coverage. Digital-only sites like The Colorado Independent and Denverite are offering oft-refreshed updates as every newsroom in between seeks to provide their own communities with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

The Colorado Media Project on March 17 announced “Colorado 2020 Misinformation Watch.” From the blog post:

Members of the network will gain access to a private, moderated Slack channel, and receive timely email updates from 20+ year veteran data journalist Sandra Fish on viral mis/disinformation on a range of topics – including COVID-19. Fish will also offer training that includes tips and tools for journalists to discover what Coloradans are seeing, and when and how to take action — and when it’s best to wait.

Read more here about the project’s new collaborative efforts to help support Colorado newsrooms through 2020. (To sign up, complete this form by the end of the month.)

Amid this firehose coverage, if you’re looking for a quick, passive way to stay up to date on Colorado headlines each morning, you might consider subscribing to ProgressNow’s Daily News Digest and synthesizing it with Complete Colorado’s news aggregator.

It would be impossible for me to highlight all of the exceptional work local reporters are doing across the state right now, but believe me they are doing it. So keep following their reporting, and, as always, subscribe to your local news source. 

They need you now more than ever.

Colorado press groups ask governor for ‘essential’ status as ‘emergency personnel’ 

On Monday, The Colorado Press Association and Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition sent a joint letter to Gov. Jared Polis seeking assurances that news operations will continue to be considered an “essential part of emergency personnel” during the state of emergency.

“Freedom of movement for credentialed reporters and those delivering newspapers is essential to our ability to keep the public apprised of rapidly evolving developments in this pandemic,” the letter read. “This is especially true in remote areas of our state with poor broadband options where local newspapers are the primary method for keeping citizens well-informed. Even in Italy where there is a total lockdown in place, news publishing operations are recognized as essential.”

Here’s more from the letter:

Our members understand the need to protect themselves and the public and they are committed to doing so through maintaining social distance and following other transmission-avoidance requirements in place. In fact, in light of the CDC’s latest policy against gatherings of ten or more people, we would like to encourage all State and local government institutions to transition to virtual press conferences. For the health and safety of critical agency leaders, reporters and staff this seems like a prudent way to balance transparency with the need to mitigate disease transmission. With the implementation of a platform such as Zoom, reporters could send questions via chat and audio to ensure these virtual press conferences remained appropriately interactive.

The governor’s communications team “has inquired with members of the Colorado press corps on recommendations for best practices,” spokesman Conor Cahill told me Tuesday evening. “As of now we’ve been told that the Denver metro TV stations have agreed to pool press conferences and the Governor is going to [be] holding press conferences in the West Foyer because it has more space and will help everyone practice good social distancing – we [are] also exploring video call options.”

Here's the full letter pic.twitter.com/Qq0a5EegrO

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) March 17, 2020

Follow my Twitter feed for more updates on how this plays out.

On March 21, the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment amended a public health order on social distancing to exempt “Newspaper, television, radio, and other media services.”

On the opinion pages, an urge of calm, also

Amid this unprecedented public health crisis, opinion leaders at some newspapers tried to reel in the chaos.

Panic and hysteria are “only making matters worse,” intoned the small Craig Daily Press. The Denver Post asked readers to “act selflessly” and avoid large gatherings. “Stop hoarding toilet paper” scolded The Steamboat Pilot. Because of that hoarding, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel took the unusual step of leaving part of its page blank— and then welcomed its readers to tear it off and use it to wipe their ass. “Many claim that this is the highest and best use of The Sentinel,” their editorial read. “Or that we’ve been scraping bottom for years. Here is a chance to make it literal.” (Not to be outdone, the small Johnston Breeze dedicated its front page to TP.) The Gazette wrote kindly of Trump and called COVID-19 a “secular, apolitical foe … we must fight … together,” while The Aurora Sentinel said “Trump’s lying has destroyed his credibility at a time Americans need it most.”

The Durango Herald editorialized about how we “seem easily to be getting the information we need from various news media as well as state and local authorities. Our innate suspicion of power has paused.” And it noted a “great coincidence at work as the Democratic Party wrestles with how far left it can go in statism, intervention in the economy, central planning, socialism, and a vastly expanded welfare state, which it turns out we could use just about now.” The Greeley Tribune took on truth itself amid a rapidly-developing story. “In journalism, we put a premium on truth,” its staffers wrote in an editorial. “Believe whatever you want about us, but the reality is that truth is our stock in trade. So this coronavirus outbreak is wild for us reporters, because the truth is constantly changing.”

Guild: Westword’s owner blames coronavirus for pay cuts and possible layoffs

The Voice Media Guild, an organizing union that represents employees who work for the company that owns Denver’s alt-weekly Westword, say the company is planning budget cuts. (Westword hasn’t joined in the unionizing effort, but some of its sister papers have.)

“The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been dramatic for companies across America,” and Voice Media Group is already feeling impacts, reads a letter the VMG said came from the owner on St. Patrick’s Day. It goes on to say “layoffs will very likely be necessary” at the company. The letter also said the company will reduce the pay of employees by 25% to 35% beginning March 18.

“Today, our staff received the somber news that we will be experiencing drastic pay cuts, and are likely to face layoffs,” the Westword account posted to Twitter. If you want to help out the free weekly, you can contribute to its membership initiative.

Westword isn’t alone:

One of the swiftest, cruelest casualties of COVID-19 in the U.S. is local alternative media. https://t.co/TA0fmFlKFs

— Sam Allard (@SceneSallard) March 18, 2020

From a recent American Press Institute newsletter:

Across the country, local alt-weeklies are shutting down or laying off staff as a direct result of the coronavirus. Fully dependent on advertising and distribution in cafes and other local businesses, many of which have temporarily closed in an effort to contain the outbreak, alt-weeklies are among the first to feel the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic. In Detroit, the Metro Times has laid off 8 staff members. The Cleveland Scene has laid off 5 employees. Voice Media Group, which alt-weeklies in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, and Denver, is cutting salaries by 25% and warns staff to brace for layoffs. In Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Gazette has laid off staff and temporarily ceased print publication.

As Westword journalists tweeted about their situation, readers chimed in saying they had become members and donated to the paper.

Major Colorado news events are scrapped

The Colorado Press Association’s board this week decided to cancel its upcoming April convention in Glenwood Springs. Organizers are now “working through how we will create interactive virtual awards presentations and celebrations,” they said.

The Denver Press Club postponed its April 11 Damon Runyon dinner, and is closed “at least” through March 31. “We will continue to pay our staff and employees their regular wages through the closure,” wrote press club president Daniel Petty in an email to members.

The Colorado Broadcasters Association also canceled its annual gala.

Colorado Broadcasters canceled its annual awards gala. “This was an extremely difficult decision.” pic.twitter.com/rK6OKjpvKs

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) March 18, 2020

Consider the ‘other casualty’ clause for legal-notice newspapers amid disrupted delivery

The cancelations above aren’t the only major events not moving forward because of an unexpected disruption, which has meant clients advertising major events are also canceling their publicity placements in local newspapers— and choking off cash flow. (Economically, state budget forecasters predict nearly $1 billion less in revenue coming in to the state because of this mess.)

So across Colorado, some newspaper owners have been airing concerns about what might happen to their status as legal notice providers if they’re forced to disrupt the frequency they publish. The Colorado Press Association sought to alleviate such fears by pointing publishers to the state statute governing it.

The relevant portion:

A newspaper shall not lose its rights as a legal publication if it fails to publish one or more of its issues by reason of a strike, transportation embargo or tie-up, or other casualty beyond the control of the publishers. Any legal notice which fails of publication for the required number of insertions by reason of a strike shall not be declared illegal if publication has been made in one issue of the publication.

“Our attorney believes the exception for ‘other casualty beyond the control of the publishers’ would apply to the worst global pandemic in modern history,” press association CEO Jill Farschman wrote to publishers this week, adding how the governor has “issued several directives severely limiting the abilities of newspapers to publish.”

Polis’s #DoingMyPartCO ‘challenge’ to reporters

Governor Jared Polis, who has held a solid, steady presence throughout the crisis, on Monday challenged a handful of journalists via Twitter to join him in explaining what they were personally doing to help stop the virus’s spread. “I’m doing a conference call in my office instead of meeting in person,” Polis said, tagging individual reporters from four TV stations along with the hashtag #DoingMyPart. “What are YOU doing to stop the spread?”

#DoingMyPartCO is our way of stopping the spread of COVID-19 in Colorado. I’m doing a conference call in my office instead of meeting in person. What are YOU doing to stop the spread?

I challenge @KyleClark @JoeStGeorge @blairmiller @CBS4Tim pic.twitter.com/TDvXSvFwkV

— Governor Jared Polis (@GovofCO) March 16, 2020

Westword ‘s Chase Woodruff had the best answer: “This is a fine idea, but don’t let the actions you take as a neighbor and a consumer become a substitute for political engagement,” he wrote. “Demanding that your local, state and national leaders respond proportionally to this massive health and economic crisis is also #DoingMyPartCO.”

While Trump has raged at the press at times during the pandemic, Polis thanked members of the press corps during a news conference. “Your reporting will save lives in the weeks and months ahead,” he said, according to his office. “You should be proud of your work. During times like this, we are reminded of how essential you are to keeping the public informed and keeping the public safe. And we will continue to need your expertise in getting this information out to as many people as possible to avoid panic.”

Colorado news outlets explained their coverage and role to readers

Constant news alerts don’t help, so The Independent won’t be carpet-bombing your inbox. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are trying to keep you, our readers, as well as our reporters and editors from burning- and tuning- out. The Independent’s news coverage over the coming weeks and months will reflect who we are as a news team. We will report with an eye toward the humanity of our sources and with a commitment to public accountability. We also will collaborate with other outlets, pooling limited resources to reach as many Coloradans as possible with information about coronavirus and the countless ways it will affect our communities. There aren’t enough journalists in our state for us not to work together, especially at a time like this.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how best to describe The Sun and how we approach the news. I came up with this: “Beyond the what. The Colorado Sun explains why.” But I also believe this: We’re stronger together, Colorado. … We have no paywall, meaning you can read as much of The Sun’s journalism as you wish without paying us, if you choose. It’s more important now than ever to ensure that every Coloradan has access to quality information.

Our coverage isn’t meant to cause panic. And it’s not to make money off of selling papers. In fact, we’ve taken down our paywall to the articles about coronavirus. We’ve offered to help the Ouray County Public Health Department spread news it needs to disseminate to the public, as we have the largest reach to inform people in Ouray County. We realize this is an important public safety issue. While we would appreciate it if you subscribed and supported our work, now is not the time to be asking you to pay for it. … Our goal is to give you useful, reliable information that helps you make decisions and be informed. Please be patient with us as we all try our best.

The April issue of 5280 went to press before COVID-19 became the biggest story in recent memory, and some of that edition of the magazine will feel out of step with the times. We wish that weren’t the case, but such are the realities of a monthly print publication schedule. As I write this, however, we have been working to incorporate coverage of the pandemic and the resultant fallout into our upcoming May issue; in that issue, you will also find the kinds of pieces we traditionally do—stories that will hopefully entertain and provide a respite for readers during these difficult times.

We know that the distrust of mainstream media is at an all-time high and that fact and fiction can be hard to sort out in a sea of opinions disguised as facts. … You may notice that we monitor social media posts on our stories more closely and that we hide or remove comments that claim facts we can’t verify, are based on rumors or hearsay or that add to hysteria rather than educate and inform. Community dialogue and discussion is important, but we won’t allow our platforms to be a breeding ground for panic based on opinion.

If you see any other compelling ones I missed, send them my way.

How newspapers across the state handled COVID-19 on their Sunday front pages

The Denver Post staff honored its journalists  

It’s been a hell of a week. So it must have been a pleasant respite for Denver Post journalists to gather at the Press Club and honor each other just before the shit hit the fan. For a newsroom troubled by cuts, moves, and anxiety in recent years, the tributes to each other were likely something of a balm, at least for an evening.

The Denver Post is holding a staff awards ceremony tonight to recognize the great journalism we do all year! pic.twitter.com/KPrNdL0ZhN

— Noelle Phillips (@Noelle_Phillips) March 14, 2020

“Photojournalist R.J. Sangosti, who distinguished himself last year with his Long Shadow project exploring life near the I-70 construction project, was named The Denver Post’s journalist of the year Friday,” the paper wrote. Other winners included Noelle Phillips for a Colleen O’Connor Coworker of the Year award; Elizabeth Hernandez for an “I (heart) Readers” award; and Elise Schmelzer for a Rising Star award. Read more about it here.

No suit for you!

Called the Colorado Rights Act, the proposal would have allowed anyone whose Colorado constitutional rights are infringed upon to bring a civil action in state court and receive reasonable attorney fees and court costs upon prevailing. It would have prohibited governments from defending against such suits by using qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields government officials from being sued for actions performed in their official capacity unless they violated clearly established law or constitutional rights.

The Maverick Observer is now live— for real

What’s new at High Country News

We’re thrilled to welcome Roberto (Bear) Guerra to the staff. Bear, a longtime contributor to HCN, has 15 years’ experience as a documentary and journalism photographer. He and his wife, Contributing Editor Ruxandra Guidi, are based in Tucson. Meanwhile, at our headquarters in Paonia, Colorado, two of our very own have published new books. Art Director Cindy Wehling assisted in the production of The North Fork in the ’90s, which features articles from The Valley Chronicle, the monthly newspaper formerly published by Cindy’s husband, Don Olsen — stories about rock ’n’ roll stars, forest fires and the quirky valley that HCN calls home. The other book comes from Executive Director Paul Larmer, who recently published a photo collection inspired by his extensive travels around the Western U.S.

The magazine’s journalists have also been all over the place recently talking to journalism students about science writing, environmental journalism, the magazine’s approach to covering the climate crisis, their paths to a career in journalism, and more. Glad to hear students are learning from these folks.

The COVID-19 novel coronavirus claimed a round of newsroom jobs in Colorado this week as revenues nosedived across local news balance sheets nationwide.

“We are not immune from the same health and business issues our communities are facing,” Doug Bennett, CEO of Ballantine Communications, told readers Tuesday about his Durango Herald newspaper. “We are supported by subscriptions and advertising. While subscriptions are staying steady, the same can’t be said for advertising.”

More from The Herald:

The Durango Herald also has felt the impact of the fight against the coronavirus. Employees are practicing social distancing, and most are working remotely from home. Reporters and editors are working longer days and weeks to provide readers with the latest developments in the pandemic. On Friday, the Herald laid off five people from its news and advertising departments, the core teams of its news business, amid falling advertising revenue. Demand for news remains high, and online subscriptions continue to increase.

The Herald, which prints three days a week, is one of the few larger family-owned regional newspapers left in Colorado. And while a newspaper typically will report on layoffs at other important local institutions, some newsroom managers, including in Colorado, don’t like to tell their readers about their own layoffs. That leaves their audiences to learn about them from other outlets or on social media, so I appreciate this from the Herald and wonder if cuts might have come to other newsrooms this week that we don’t yet know about.

“I am a broadcast casualty of Covid,” one public radio employee in Colorado told me Thursday. “I just lost my voice tracking gig of 14 months because of ad revenue shortfalls.”

Meanwhile, multiple sources say some of the Prairie Mountain Media papers, which are part of the constellation of properties under the Alden Global Capital hedge fund umbrella, have suspended freelance work. A freelance writer for one of them, Colorado Daily, said Thursday he is out of a writing gig, and cursed the hedge fund on his way out.

Impacts of the virus have been deadly to newspapers across the country. COVID-19 is “speeding up the collapse of local newsrooms,” CNN reported. Particularly, it has been a “nearly perfect weapon against alternative weeklies,” wrote the editor of The Riverfront Times in St. Louis. Alt-weeklies rely heavily on ads from bars, restaurants, and events, which are now closed and canceled.

At Denver’s alt-weekly, some Westword staffers fear layoffs after their company, Voice Media Group, announced it would slash their pay by 25%. As Westword journalists tweeted about their situation, readers chimed in saying they had become members and donated to the paper. (Click here to do that yourself.) Layoffs have already hit Westword’s sister papers in Phoenix, Arizona, and Miami Florida.

Two counties to the west, Boulder Weekly has altered its distribution because so many of the places where readers can find it are shuttered. Those who deliver the paper, “will be handling the papers they distribute with gloves, and employing any and all possible measures to ensure the purity of our papers,” the local owners told readers last week. But that won’t happen in the near future. With “the County’s stay-at-home order in place, we will publish our content exclusively online during the weeks of April 2, 9 and 16,” owner Stewart Sallo wrote March 26. The paper has also offered to post gift cards on its e-commerce site and is sending all money collected to the appropriate restaurants.

About 100 miles south on I-25, the locally owned Colorado Springs Independent is printing fewer papers now that fewer places that carry them are open. Some managers have taken pay cuts, but the paper guaranteed all full-time salaries through May 15. “We don’t know what’s going on and we wanted to give a sense of security to our staff and our readers that we’re in this for the long haul, because we are,” John Weiss, who founded the paper, told me Tuesday. “Change brings opportunities and we are a nimble company,” he added. “If we decimate our staff we’ll be cutting off our nose to spite our face.” The paper launched a newsletter for coronavirus coverage and an initiative with local restaurants called #DineINdy. “These past few weeks, though, have been difficult for all of us at the Indy,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. “As we see our advertising partners struggle, we’ve helped by mobilizing our readers to visit local restaurants and bars for takeout. We’re sharing the innovative ways businesses and individuals are responding to the coronavirus crisis. And we’re sharing your good news while keeping you updated about the swiftly changing mandates coming from state and local government.”

From the Colorado Springs alt-weekly @csindependent pic.twitter.com/TiZBfjGXl9

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) March 28, 2020

In the Aspen area, the weekly Snowmass Sun will now be incorporated into a four-page section of The Aspen Times “for an unforeseen length of time (hopefully just a few weeks),” wrote Aspen Times editor David Krause this week.

Elsewhere in the mountains towns, “I regretfully announce that we’ll be suspending the weekly operations of the Roaring Fork Weekly Journal. It was our hope and intention from the beginning to give the midvalley a news product and voice of its own,” wrote publisher David A. Cook on Thursday. “While there are certainly forces well beyond our control please know that we take full responsibility for this action. We must, as a news organization, rally around and protect our core product, the Aspen Daily News, to ensure the existence of locally owned and operated media in the Roaring Fork Valley.”

Across the state, editors and publishers lauded the contributions of their staffers who are working under unprecedented circumstances. Fifteen people “in 15 different locations put together a paper in what was one of the most miraculous feats of #journalism I’ve ever experienced,” wrote Dave Perry who edits The Aurora Sentinel. “I just finished the paper and was in awe,” wrote Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo, who leads The Denver Post, about her own paper’s Sunday edition. “News, analysis, stories about coping. Incredible effort by an incredible … team.”

The new working conditions for journalists include more desk-bound coverage— and wrestling with “the ethics of going out” to report. “I’m older than 60, and my immune system is compromised,” wrote senior columnist and reporter Kevin Duggan at The Coloradoan in Fort Collins. “If I were to get sick, it could be very bad news for me.” (On March 21, the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment amended a public health order to exempt “Newspaper, television, radio, and other media services” from social distancing regulations.) Days before Denver’s mayor put the city on lockdown, Westword’s Michael Roberts conducted a journalistic experiment. “The idea was simple: I would walk around … near where I live, for an extended period of time, and count every adult and child off their property, as well as any car driving on a neighborhood street,” he wrote. Read his findings here.

Here’s Jessica Lee Gibbs, who covers Douglas County for Colorado Community Media:

Kid, I can't wait to tell you about the time society shut down during a pandemic and you slept on mom's lap, drooling on her shoulder with a double ear infection, while she filed stories and thought of ways to let you know it was all going to be OK. pic.twitter.com/4I6bwPuZKZ

— Jessica Lee Gibbs (@JessicaLeeGibbs) March 19, 2020

Newspapers across Colorado started talking directly to their readers.

On the front pages of The Boulder Daily Camera, The Longmont Times-Call, and The Loveland Reporter-Herald appeared a note from the publisher of Prairie Mountain Media (under the Alden Global hedge fund umbrella). “Our news team is working around the clock to bring you essential information and the latest news about this pandemic as well as our community’s everyday news,” he said. Out on the Western Slope in Grand Junction, Daily Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton made a front-page plea to readers of the family-owned paper. “Newspapers rely on advertising revenue to operate,” he wrote. “Revenue from advertisements, which had declined gradually over the years, has steepened its slide as local businesses suffer themselves. The future of The Daily Sentinel relies on you, our subscribers. Please consider renewing or extending your subscription now.”

Journalistically, The Denver Post’s Sunday lead story on the front page, written by reporter Jon Murray, deviated from the paper’s typically detached view-from-nowhere tone and read more as an evocative and sweeping reported essay with passages in the first person.

Making sure digital outlets weren’t duplicating efforts in a time of overdrive reporting, some of them reached out to each other to offer cross-pollination, like when The Colorado Sun re-published Tina Griego’s Colorado Independent piece about the state girding for a “wave of domestic violence” amidst quarantines and job losses.

As The New York Times detailed, it has been a cruel irony that local news outlets in recent weeks have been dealt a “crippling blow” as they struggle to report “the biggest of stories.” From NYT:

For newer outlets that started as online publications, the pandemic has been less damaging, said Jason Bade, the president of Pico, a software start-up that works with digital publications including The Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago and BoiseDev of Idaho.

“While we appreciate all those who support @ColoradoSun through sponsorships, most of our support comes directly from members,” wrote Sun Editor Larry Ryckman. “That helps us during such a time.”

As Congress hashed out emergency economic legislation, two news industry advocates wrote a piece for The Atlantic headlined “The coronavirus is killing local news.” The federal government “should not ‘bail out’ newsrooms,” they wrote, “but future stimulus plans should include steps that can help save local news organizations.”

The Society of Professional Journalists, which has produced a newsroom guide to COVID-19, also wants to hear what newsrooms need. “What would help? What would make you breathe easier as the pace and scope of this story grows?” asked SPJ president-elect Matthew T. Hall. “Let me know. Tell us at @spj_tweets . We’re stronger together.” (The Colorado Press Association on Thursday sent a newsletter full of resources and information, too, so get a hold of them if you’d like a copy.)

During Colorado’s stay-in-place order, the news is ‘critical’

Under a section titled “these are the businesses that will be open” in Gov. Jared Polis’s executive order for Coloradans to stay in place, which he announced Wednesday, appeared this: Newspapers, television, radio, and “other media services.” Those businesses were also listed under a section that described “Critical Business or Operation” under the order.

And we’re in good company:

Tfw you know what’s critical in these times pic.twitter.com/GOyDXg6gf3

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) March 26, 2020

“This is the recognition we needed to continue broadcasting, maintaining and informing our communities,” said Justin Sasso, president of the Colorado Broadcasters Association. “Listener and viewership is at a pinnacle for radio and television during this crisis and communities would panic if they lost this vital connection.”

Not that journalists would have just stayed home.

It’s nice to be considered essential, but honestly, do you think we’d close up shop if the governor decides we’re not? That’s unimaginable.

— Jim Clarke (@JimClarkeAP) March 20, 2020

Press groups urge governments to stay transparent

Among more than 130 organizations urging state and local governments to “recommit to, and not retrench from, their duty to include the public in the policy-making process, including policies relating to COVID-19 as well as the routine ongoing functions of governance,” is the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

From the CFOIC:

CFOIC signed a statement drafted by the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information that asks government bodies to defer making noncritical policy decisions “until full and meaningful public involvement can be guaranteed.” When government bodies do meet, they should take every available measure to 1) notify the public of those meetings and explain how to participate remotely; 2) use widely available technologies to maximize real-time public engagement; and 3) preserve a viewable record of proceedings that is promptly made accessible online.

I’m reminded in these fluid and nebulous times about something the late Texas columnist Molly Ivins used to say about the things we might be willing to give up when we’re frightened.

“We get scared so bad–about the communist menace or illegal immigration or AIDS or pornography or violent crime, some damn scary thing— that we hurt ourselves,” she wrote in 1993, even before 9/11 and The Patriot Act. “We take the odd notion that the only way to protect ourselves is to give up some of our freedom— just trim a little, hedge a bit, and we’ll all be safe after all. Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever onward and upward are dead damned wrong. Many a time freedom has been rolled back— and always for the same sorry reason: fear.”

So keep an eye on that.

Speaking of fear, the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent publisher talked about panic

Following his recent newspaper column headlined “Panic at the Costco— shifting away from mob mentality,” publisher Jerry Raehal appeared on KDNK radio in Carbondale to talk about it, and also about how the century-old Swift-communications-owned paper is adapting to a new normal.

“It’s not easy working from home at times,” he said. “And different team members had different challenges with that but we’re making it work.”

Meanwhile, “online readership is surging,” he said. “We’re double, triple, or more on our website every day right now.” (I imagine that’s the case across the board at local news outlets.) The paper lifted its paywall, and because their analytics show a group of people who predominately read the paper’s paid e-edition are “susceptible” to the virus, Raehal told KDNK they made it free to read— “revenue be damned.”

Emergency home for orphan counties a ‘bright spot’ amid outbreak

For decades, when residents who watch TV via satellite in two Colorado counties, La Plata and Montezuma, turned on the “local news,” they were treated to newscasts from Albuquerque, New Mexico. That’s because they live in so-called “orphan counties,” like many that pock the United States, where news comes beamed in from the state next door because of decisions by the private Nielsen ratings company and the public Federal Communications Commission.

Here’s what I wrote about Colorado’s orphan counties for Columbia Journalism Review last year:

La Plata residents turned their frustrations on the FCC, and submitted hundreds of letters to its online public docket. “I feel shut out of what is going on in my own state because we do not have access to Denver television,” wrote a woman from Bayfield. “Granted I live in a forgotten corner of the state, but the goings on with in the state is essential,” wrote someone from Durango. “We would like to be informed voters,” one couple wrote. “I don’t care about New Mexico politics or their elections. We want to see what is going on in our state capital.” Residents have cast their plight as a “ridiculous situation,” “absurd,” and “blatantly obvious at election time.”

Following pressure from members of Colorado’s congressional delegation and the state’s new Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, the FCC last summer finally granted La Plata and Montezuma the ability to receive programming from Denver TV stations via satellite. In December, Rocky Mountain PBS was the first to get on board. Other Denver TV stations hadn’t yet hashed out agreements about whether they would or wouldn’t beam their programming into the Four Corners region.

It appears COVID-19 changed that. From The Durango Herald:

Local, state and federal elected officials called on broadcasters this week to reach a temporary agreement to allow Denver television stations to be broadcast in La Plata County, which is considered an “orphan county” by being lumped in with New Mexico’s Nielsen market area. Officials said La Plata County residents have been missing important updates about the coronavirus pandemic in their own state, including news briefings by Gov. Jared Polis.

“As the state confronts the COVID-19 crisis, DISH is pleased to offer subscribers in La Plata County access to Colorado-based news and information,” said Jeff Blum, DISH senior vice president of public policy and government affairs.

On Tuesday, the paper reported Denver’s ABC affiliate KMGH and FOX affiliate KDVR are now available in the counties via DISH, and ABC should be available for DirecTV customers. “The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, is an urgent reminder that access to local news is not a mere convenience for local residents,” reads a March 19 letter from Weiser, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, and Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton.

Here was the kicker to a recent Durango Herald story: “The crumbling resistance of Denver affiliates to offer their signals to the state’s Southwest corner appears to be one of the few bright spots in the unrelenting grim nature of events since the outbreak of COVID-19.”

How the pandemic looked on Colorado’s Sunday front pages

The Longmont Times-Call reported how CU Boulder’s Natural Hazards Center is focused on the virus. The Loveland Reporter-Herald covered how the virus created a surge for area delivery drivers. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel focused its coverage on the virus’s impact on local homeless services centers. The Gazette in Colorado Springs covered how a Colorado “prepper” sees the pandemic “as a wake-up call.” The Coloradoan in Fort Collins spoke with a local patient who explained what it feels like to have the virus. The Summit Daily News offered stay-at-home workout tips from local experts. The Durango Herald covered how to manage stress during the pandemic. Under the headline “A moment when normal changed,” The Denver Post published an account about Denver life amid the pandemic that included passages by the reporter in the first person. With the words “booze” and “pot” in large font on its front page, The Boulder Daily Camera reported on certain retailers that are seeing a boom in these strange days.

Why The Wall Street Journal removed a photo of Colorado students on a COVID-19 story

On March 18, The Wall Street Journal published a story headlined “A Generational War is Brewing Over Coronavirus,” that had a (brief) Colorado connection. The photograph that ran with the story was of Colorado College seniors participating in a “champagne showers” tradition on campus, making them the unwilling faces of a generational divide over how to deal with the virus.

A journalism minor who appeared in the photo, Catie McDonald, wrote a letter to the Journal pointing out how the photo was taken March 11, “before social-distancing guidelines were in place.” The letter went on to explain how the students “weren’t actively defying rules; we were living in a moment that stood for so many unlived moments. We are at war with Covid-19; we cannot afford to be at war with each other.”

The Wall Street Journal removed the photo and ran a note in its “Corrections & Amplifications” section. “The photo has been removed because the article’s headline incorrectly implied that the students were among a number of young people not taking the threat of coronavirus seriously, thereby hindering the fight against the virus’s spread,” the item read.

Locally, McDonald published a guest column in The Colorado Springs Independent about the incident. “My letter to the editor was allowed only 270 words,” she wrote. “Here is the full version, written from my self-mandated and expert-recommended quarantine in New Mexico.” Read the whole thing here.

Editors and publishers continued to explain their coverage and role

During Week II of Colorado’s local media response to a story that seemed to come out of nowhere, newsroom leaders continued to elucidate their role at a time when media has come under attack in certain quarters, including during White House briefings. (Some outlets have stopped airing those briefings live, with one NPR station in Washington State saying it’s because of “a pattern of false or misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time.”)

At The Gazette in Colorado Springs, which has lifted its paywall for coronavirus coverage and launched a free newsletter about the pandemic, Editor Vince Bzdek penned a column calling “freedom of information” the “best weapon” against this virus. “Trusted local information sources are really the best way to find out what you need to do in your own backyard to keep yourself safe,” he wrote. “Good information vs. bad, in the coming weeks, may literally spell the difference between life and death.”

Speaking on a local talk radio program, Colorado Sun Editor Larry Ryckman said the year-and-a-half-old digital newsroom has seen “just off the charts traffic” in the past few weeks. “We don’t make money off of our traffic, that’s not our business model,” he said, “it’s just a reflection of how much people trust us and how many people are coming to us.” Within the past several days, 500 people became paying members, he said on March 23. That represents “by far the strongest period” of donations since the outlet’s launch. “People want facts,” he said. “Fear grows in the absence of information. … It is important for all of us to have access to actual facts, to just sober, fact-checked information, and that’s what we provide.”

The Sun has also launched a new vertical called “Write On, Colorado” that in a time of social distancing asks “all of you, anyone with the capacity and the willingness to commit your thoughts to print, to share your observations of the many aspects of this remarkable period.” The outlet will publish “select pieces periodically — an ongoing time capsule of sorts — as we confront the challenges ahead of us.”

“I won’t lie to you when I divulge that we’re making this up as we go along,” wrote Editor Dave Perry at The Aurora Sentinel.

At The Denver Post, because of a lack of games and other activity, the paper is scaling back its sports coverage “until things start returning to normal,” Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo wrote. “This move also lets our sports staff help with work related to covering the coronavirus and its impact on the state.” (The paper’s deputy sports editor has more about that here.)

In Fort Collins at the Gannett-owned Coloradoan newspaper, which is part of the USA Today network, Editor Eric Larsen wrote what he called “the most difficult column I’ve written in my nearly 20 years as a professional journalist.” In it, he wrote of how the 16-journalist newsroom is coping. “Journalism is an inherently social pursuit. A reporter’s best days are filled with face-to-face interactions, shaking hands and sharing stories,” he wrote. “Now that’s a problem.”

A ‘selfless act of love’ for an ‘Ancient’ KDNK DJ

If you’re looking for a heartwarming local media story in these dark times, Current magazine has one for you about the KDNK local public radio station in Carbondale, Colorado. It focuses on a nonagenarian station DJ named “Ancient” Art Ackerman and how he was able to keep the hits spinning while the coronavirus kept him home.

From Current:

As the novel coronavirus outbreak continued to spread, KDNK Station Manager Gavin Dahl made the call that it was too risky for Ackerman, who is 94, to come to the studio for his show Swing Swing Swing. The weekly show mostly features swing jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, chosen from Ackerman’s personal record collection. … Dahl told Current that he had to tell Ackerman, “‘I gotta be the bad cop on this one, man. I can’t be responsible for letting you come in right now.’” Ackerman wanted to be there for his listeners. “He’s like, ‘I want to do my show,’” Dahl said. … So Dahl came up with the idea to pick up Ackerman’s albums and drop the needle on the records in the studio while Ackerman hosted from his home by phone. So the two worked something out. … It was a hit with listeners. “People were telling me they were crying,” Dahl said.

With a cameo from his 16-year-old cat Sparkles, Ackerman’s stay-at-home show helped the station reach its fundraising goal of $80,000.

Colorado Public Radio CEO Stewart Vanderwilt told Current “that he heard about Dahl playing Ackerman’s playlist while he called in to host” and said it “struck me as a selfless act of love on his part and my wife and I made a point to listen in.”

The video guest list will include 50 senior couples dressed in formal attire who will be treated to live music provided by KGNU’s two-time Westword magazine “Best of Denver” DJ Erin Stereo, and chaperoned by KGNU’s Denver program manager and DJ, Deeprawk Dave Ashton. The entire event, complete with the virtual “crowning” of Prom King and Queen will be broadcast live on KGNU radio. … Parents and other community members can join the fun by listening to the live broadcast of this event or by streaming it online at kgnu.org.

“I went to as many school dances during my time as a DPS student as my parents would allow, but the anticipation of Prom was bigger than all of them,” Ashton said in a statement. “COVID-19 can’t infect the Prom vision.”

Why the Coloradoan isn’t into ‘publicly shaming children’ over racist behavior

Earlier this month, social media and news reports began to swirl about a group of [Poudre School District] students posting racist video content on social platforms. I’ve reviewed the posts, which were forwarded to Coloradoan reporters by people demanding that the school district take punitive action against the students. The Coloradoan will not republish the posts for the simple reason that doing so will not only further their intolerant message, but cause irreparable damage to the underage students who posted them.These videos may follow those children for the rest of their lives, in Google searches done by college admissions staff, in background checks by prospective employers, in situations I can’t currently fathom.

In no way do I condone any racist behavior, but publicly shaming children for their ignorance is not an appropriate use of the Coloradoan’s resources. I also chafe at the idea that these students should be removed from our public schools as punishment. If racism is a learned behavior, so is tolerance. If ignorance breeds ignorance, then the only tool we have against it is education. PSD has a role to play here, but it’s not to shun these students. It’s to better challenge their narrow way of thinking in the hope that someday they will realize the hurtfulness or their actions and alter course.

Speaking of the Coloradoan…

With Colorado working to recover from the economic toll of the coronavirus, and with the November election looming, a lot of news of importance across the state will come from the blocks surrounding the Capitol. The 10-person team of the Colorado Sun has distinguished itself as a trusted news source in short order, and we’re excited to add its coverage to our lineup. Sun articles will appear partially online, with links back to Coloradosun.com, and in full in print.

“The Colorado Sun is proud to share its content with the Coloradoan and the Chieftain,” said Sun Editor Larry Ryckman. “The Sun’s politics coverage has twice been recognized by its journalism peers this year with first-place awards for Public Service in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region. We’re independent and strictly non-partisan, and we always put readers first. We’re delighted that readers in Fort Collins and Pueblo will become part of the Sun community.”

What you missed on the Sunday front pages across Colorado

Denver has encrypted radio traffic for about a year

“For the third straight year, lawmakers rejected a proposal to address the trend among law enforcement agencies in Colorado to fully encrypt their radio traffic.” So wrote Jeffrey Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition last month in a wrap-up of the latest legislative session.

Police encrypting their radio traffic has been a theme in Colorado as technology advances and anyone with a smartphone can listen in to some cop channels in the way reporters used to keep an ear to the squawking scanner in a newsroom. Law enforcement officers have moved to shut that down arguing that criminals could rely on it to keep from getting caught.

But encrypted radio traffic also “makes it difficult or impossible for reporters to learn of significant police activity in a timely manner, and it undermines their fundamental role as government watchdogs,” editorialized The Boulder Daily Camera earlier this year. “If reporters are in the dark, so are members of the public, whom the police are supposed to serve.” (Last year, Columbia Journalism Review reported how a “national study published in 2017 found that police PIOs zealously try to control the narratives about their departments.”)

Last year, Denver police tried to sell un-encrypted scanners to some local media outlets for $4,000 that came with an agreement about how they would use them, but local media brushed them off.

This week, CBS4 news director Tim Wieland told an inside story about what it was like for a news organization trying to deal with Denver police over the issue. Over many months, journalists and the department tried to work out an agreement. They thought they were close. The “deal killers, it turns out, were the auditor and city attorney,” Wieland said.

The deal killers, it turns out, were the auditor and city attorney. The license had 2 issues: one required newsrooms to cover the city’s legal costs in the event of a lawsuit, the other allowed the city to examine our notes and records related to the use of scanners. Uh, no.

— Tim Wieland (@CBS4Tim) July 9, 2020

A license for newsrooms came with requirements for “newsrooms to cover the city’s legal costs in the event of a lawsuit, the other allowed the city to examine our notes and records related to the use of scanners. Uh, no,” Wieland went on. In other words, no deal. “It leaves us all in the dark, now reliant on police PIOs,” Wieland said. “As we’ve seen in recent cases, that information is rarely timely and never complete. The public, then, is not fully informed on police activity in their community. At best, that info is hours late; at worst, months late.”

So, what now?

“There’s a lot of lofty talk by city leaders about providing more transparency in policing,” the newsroom leader said. “They’re talking the talk. Great. Now, let’s walk the walk and reach an agreement that serves the community. A public safety agency should not operate outside of public view.”

More Colorado local media odds & ends

• Gazette editor Vince Bzdek wrote about journalistic objectivity. NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones and others fired back.

I don’t know Mr. Bzdek but I can’t help but hear the racial undertones of suggesting JOC who are demanding that we stop hiding behind this faux objectivity and instead produce journalism that is more accurate, more fair, is akin to abandoning standards. https://t.co/x2fM101ygs

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 5, 2020

• A Pueblo Chieftain editor’s note stated a “reporter was endangered and was prohibited from further covering this event.” But then the note disappeared. (Story in question here.)
• COLab has a new homepage.
• Take this newsroom survey from the University of Denver and Colorado Press Association.
• Colorado’s rogue national elector, Micheal Baca, leads off an upcoming book on the Electoral College and the Hamilton Elector movement, and includes his inside story.
• Cory Gardner said without citing evidence “the media does not want us to win.”
• Sign up for The Colorado College COVID-19 Reporting Project’s daily newsletter for pandemic-related higher-ed news.
• Webinar registration: “The Art and Craft of the Interview: How to Deeply Listen.”
• Empowering Colorado wants to know what you think about media coverage of energy development.
• KUNC’s CEO, Neil Best, is retiring. “No big fireworks going out the door.”

The powerful national nonprofit public-interest journalism outlet ProPublica is expanding — perhaps even into our state’s borders.

From an announcement this week:

ProPublica announced on Thursday that it is dramatically scaling up its commitment to local investigative journalism with the launch of three regional reporting hubs. The nonprofit news organization will establish two new units covering the South and Southwest. ProPublica Illinois, which since 2017 has published investigative journalism on key issues in Illinois, will be transformed into a unit covering a broader swath of the Midwest. In addition to the regional reporting hubs, ProPublica is launching a Distinguished Fellows program to support proven investigative journalists. Selected fellows will embark on three-year partnerships with ProPublica, as they report from their local newsrooms.

Funding for the expansion comes from “two significant grants from philanthropic entities, one a donor-advised fund held at the Pew Charitable Trusts,” and will allow the outlet to hire 30 new people across the country.

The new money, the outlet stated, will allow for:

A six-person reporting unit based in Phoenix to cover the Southwest, including New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and possibly Colorado.

“The Midwest, South and Southwest are areas of the country with growing, diverse and underrepresented populations, and these regions appear frequently in ProPublica reporting on a range of issues, from health care to education to criminal justice and beyond,” ProPublica editor Stephen Engelberg said in a statement. “The regional hubs will tackle these issues, publishing stories in a manner tailored to the areas, matching local talent and knowledge with national expertise and guidance.”

Major recent realignments in Colorado’s journalism scene through the COLab initiative have also created something of a new ProPublica-like model here. As part of their COLab work, editors Susan Greene and Tina Griego, formerly of The Colorado Independent, are working with small newspapers around the state on deep investigations and enterprise reporting. Such partnerships can have serious impact. This year, The Anchorage Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting its newsroom did in collaboration with ProPublica.

News that its expansion might reach Colorado made the rounds here Thursday.

“Just do the non-Denver part,” said John Rodriguez, the former publisher of PULP newsmagazine who now works in communications for the City of Pueblo. “And you’ll be grand.”

A ‘previously unpublished interview with a local newspaper columnist in his native Yuma County’

Those words above are what immediately jumped out at me when scrolling through a recent story about the incumbent in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race written by HuffPost’s climate reporter Alexander C. Kaufman.

The story stems from a recently unearthed phone call that was recorded three years ago between Colorado’s Republican U.S. senator and a columnist for the Yuma Pioneer newspaper in the politician’s hometown.

Here’s the HuffPost story’s lead:

Facing an uphill battle for reelection in a state where two-thirds of registered voters polled last month said they favored a Senate candidate who promised “aggressive action” on climate change, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner (R) has billed himself as a “national leader” on climate issues and run three separate ads casting himself as a pragmatic environmentalist.

But in a 2017 audiotape HuffPost obtained, Gardner squirms out of questions about what is causing climate change, instead leaning into conspiratorial thinking that efforts to curb carbon emissions are part of a larger plan to “control the economy.”

“There are people who want to control the economy as a result of their belief about the environment,” Gardner said in a previously unpublished interview with a local newspaper columnist in his native Yuma County in rural eastern Colorado. “Absolutely, there are.”

There’s a policy angle to this story about a major politician’s stance on climate change. There’s a political angle to it, too. He’s in a tough re-election campaign against the state’s popular former governor, John Hickenlooper. In response to the piece, one oil-and-gas backer pointed to remarks Hickenlooper, a former geologist, made in 2010 in which he expressed skepticism about climate science. Hickenlooper doesn’t want to ban fracking but said this summer he wants to make it “obsolete” and supports transitioning to net-zero emissions and a 100% renewable energy economy by 2050, though his record and rhetoric is complicated. (In a 2018 summary to policymakers, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned humans would have to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to ward off dire consequences from a global temperature increase.)

The HuffPo item is also a media story. The primary source material for the national piece comes from a 17-minute phone conversation Gardner had in 2017 with Gregory Hill, a novelist from Eastern Colorado who writes columns for The Yuma Pioneer. That conversation got testy when Gardner danced around questions Hill had about the senator’s thoughts on humans causing climate change.

Gardner, a close ally to President Donald Trump, is up for re-election next month, and pundits and journalists generally intone in a sage and sober way that he faces [sage and sober pundit voice] steep odds.

Here’s more from HuffPo:

It’s [a] desire to unseat Gardner that convinced Hill to share his interview with a reporter. Following their testy Tuesday morning call three years ago, Gardner’s team contacted Tony Rayl, the editor of the Yuma Pioneer, to complain about the columnist’s tone and ask whether Hill truly worked for the paper. Hill, who said he is on the autism spectrum and reacts angrily when someone appears to be evading simple questions, was embarrassed at losing his temper. “I felt like a failure,” he said in a phone call with HuffPost. And in a county of roughly 10,000 people, he didn’t want his mostly conservative neighbors to see him as “the shrill, hysterical version of the liberal that they already have in their mind.”

So, three years later, how did Kaufman, a national reporter, learn about a never-published column and get this scoop from Hill that included nearly 20 minutes of audio?

Even though a Hill-authored column about the phone call never appeared in the local newspaper, Hill did transcribe his interview and share it with friends, Kaufman says.

“A long-time source of mine in Colorado — whose request for anonymity I am compelled to respect here —  tipped me off to the existence of the interview,” Kaufman told me. He said he emailed Hill “who shared the interview and gave me permission to publish it in full.”

Why Marty C did it

Two months after a TV weathercaster lost his job at the NBC affiliate in Denver following a tweet in which he compared federal troops in U.S. cities to Nazis, he is speaking out about why he did what he did.

I’ve never seen myself as a journalist. My training is in psychology and political science, and then late in my college career, I cultivated my fascination with meteorology. I am a scientist who happened to be engaged in mass media, like Bill Nye without the bow tie. As such, I observed journalists for a long, long time. The wealth of close contact that I enjoyed brought me to the conclusion that journalists do not set out to lie, twist the truth or advance an agenda. The people with whom I worked at several media outlets tirelessly sought to achieve accuracy even when interview subjects were hiding the truth.

Balance in storytelling was also the topic of long conversations in editorial meetings…to be sure that all relevant, varied points of view in a story were presented in a restrained, respectful way. In other words, playing by the rules of a polite society.

The mistake that journalists have made is to assume that our current president and his ilk have any intention of playing by those same rules.

My father fought the fascist Germans in North Africa and the fascist Italians in Italy during World War II. Three of my brothers served in the Army. My late brother Tim was an Army Airborne Ranger and retired as a major after a twenty-year career. So don’t you dare try to lecture me about respecting our veterans. It was at that moment I realized that maintaining a high-prestige job with a comfortable lifestyle and predictable future was not the most important thing to me. The idea of what America is — self-government, equal access under the law, equal justice under the law, respect for truth: Those were the things that were the most important to me.

More Colorado local media odds & ends

Colorado Newsline published an in-depth three-part series, “Climate Inaction,” that examines “the troubled relationship between Gov. Jared Polis and a landmark climate action law.”
A groundbreaking project “examining the history of anti-Black harm in the U.S. media system” counts Colorado’s Diamond Hardiman of News Voices: Colorado as a contributor.
A Colorado Sun contributor this week found a “cheery” 1925 newspaper article in the Sterling Democrat describing a massive Ku Klux Klan celebration, “complete with a parade, fireworks and wedding at the town fairgrounds, saying it was the largest crowd ever gathered for an evening of any kind in this county.'”
⚭This newspaper/advertiser relationship is complicated.
CPR News paid “more than $2,500 split almost equally between counties and the Secretary of State’s office for thousands of pages of emails related to the conduct of Colorado elections.”
Readers at COLab/The Colorado Independent weigh in on truth-telling and bias.
Ari Armstrong wrote about Frederick Douglass’s ties to Colorado.
Media Bias Chart creator Vanessa Otero of Colorado is offering news literacy workshops this month.
Colorado College canceled classes on Election Day after a student “submitted a formal request to the college and promoted the idea in the campus newspaper.”
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel writes of the GOP congressional candidate on the Western Slope: “Boebert spent the majority of her time with the editorial board refusing to answer questions until she got through a point-by-point refutation of [a guest column] Mitsch Bush wrote about her views on health-care policy” and “there was no time for an adequate number of questions after her filibuster.”
Labor reporter Taylor Allen said “Last week was my last” at Colorado Public Radio. “More info on next steps later … It’s been a hard year and I’m in awe of people’s resilience.”
From The Steamboat Pilot & Today, reporting on the death of a local man in an ultralight aircraft crash in Indiana: “[Mike] Schlichtman’s wife of 35 years, Lisa Schlichtman, is editor of Steamboat Pilot & Today.”
The Colorado Press Association officially changed its address to the Buell Public Media Center.
Click here for a Google Doc betting bracket of currently employed Denver journos who might take the Axios newsletter-writing job.
A Colorado reporter gives an election-year reminder: Editorial boards “are entirely separate from newsrooms at a newspaper.”
From The Cañon City Daily Record: “Reporter, publisher, lumberman, and congressman, Guy U. Hardy played many leading roles in Cañon City in its early years.”
KRCC public radio in the Springs is getting a new Morning Edition host.
KUSA 9News show “Next” stated Wednesday “We’re told Comcast is working through outages of certain stations.” Host Kyle Clark told rival CBS4’s Jim Benemann “You’re welcome.”
The first issue of the revamped Mountain Gazette magazine, under a new owner, is off to the printer this week.
Colorado Press Women’s “popular fall Author’s event” is moving to Zoom.
Harvard’s NiemanLab offers advice for journalists about how not to cover voter fraud disinformation.

*This column appears a little differently as a published version of a weekly e-mailed newsletter about Colorado local news and media. If you’d like to add your e-mail address for the unabridged versions, please subscribe HERE. Image via Wikimedia Commons. 

Conversations about whether to increase public-sector support for a struggling local news industry have been taking place lately among Colorado’s journalistic community more than elsewhere.

But a new story this week by a local public radio reporter shows how tax money in Colorado has been going to support journalism of a different sort.

First, to recap those recent discussions about public support for media here:

• Last spring, community members in Longmont made national news when they floated an idea of a local library taxing district to help subsidize a local news outlet.
• Last fall, the Colorado Media Project published a policy paper that laid out specific recommendations around this question: “Should state and local governments play a role in stabilizing and sustaining the future of local news, information, and independent journalism?”
• Journalism advocates like First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg and former Denver Post editor Greg Moore have publicly said they are thinking differently these days about the role of government in supporting local news because of troubles facing the industry.
• In November, when PEN America came out in favor of more public-sector support for local news, the group commissioned a case study of Denver’s media environment and convened a public panel discussion in Denver.
• In April, Gov. Jared Polis threw cold water on the idea of state support for local news publishers when asked about it at a press conference. “We have a free and independent press,” he said. “That is hard to reconcile with government assistance. The minute … a Governor Polis or President Trump is paying you or propping you up, that causes if not a compromising of professional independence — and it might not — an appearance of impropriety.”
• In May, however, for the first time ever, the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade offered a $100,000 Advanced Industries Accelerator Grant opportunity to a local news publisher.
• Meanwhile, throughout our pandemic summer, news outlets across the state had no qualms about applying for and receiving federal Paycheck Protection Program relief from the U.S. Small Business Administration.
• At the federal level, Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Senator, Michael Bennet, recently introduced The Future of Local News Commission Act, which could, in part, “explore the possible creation of a new national endowment for local journalism, or the reform and expansion of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or another appropriate institution, to make public funds a part of a multi-faceted approach to sustaining local news.”

Now, KUNC reporter Scott Franz, who reports for a collection of public radio stations as part of Rocky Mountain Community Radio, has unearthed even more ways Colorado government is already helping to subsidize local news— just not among Colorado’s own press corps.

From KUNC:

Officials in Colorado have been spending money to bring travel writers to the state. It’s a practice that raises questions for one media ethicist and, as an open records request has revealed, some journalists aren’t disclosing to their readers where the money came from.

Three travel writers from Austin, Texas arrived in Colorado with their families in July with action-packed itineraries given to them by Colorado’s state government. Pam LeBlanc, a freelance writer for some of Texas’ biggest newspapers and magazines, sipped hard cider at an orchard near Paonia and rafted the Arkansas River near Buena Vista. Austin American Statesman travel editor Kristin Finan soaked in the Glenwood Hot Springs Pool. And Statesman freelancer Mauri Elbel and her family ordered beef tartare, halibut and trout at a fine dining restaurant in Breckenridge following a summer dog sledding tour.

Records obtained through an open records request reveal Colorado taxpayers paid most of their travel expenses for their roughly weeklong trips, which occurred when mask mandates were in place after a July spike in coronavirus cases.

The story details “a much broader program, which has used taxpayer money to pay for journalist getaways for several years.” Last year, the “state paid $32,000 through the program,” Franz revealed.

Franz’s reporting has already caused a stir at some of the local news outlets where the travel stories landed. More from KUNC:

…editors of the Austin American Statesman and the Houston Chronicle refused interview requests to talk about the travel stories they published as a result of Colorado’s journalist hosting program. But when provided with public records showing the journalists had accepted payment for their travel expenses from Colorado taxpayers, the editors issued statements condemning the practice. “We weren’t aware of this practice, and it doesn’t meet the standards we’ve established for our staffers,” Chronicle editor Steve Riley wrote. “We’ll be looking further into this issue to ensure freelancers follow the same standards.” …

Austin American Statesman editor John Bridges said reporters must “remain free of potential conflicts of interest and financial relationships that might compromise the credibility of our reporting.” “Accepting free lodging and/or reimbursements is a violation of our principles of ethical conduct,” he wrote. “We are investigating this matter and taking appropriate action.”

Some of the journalists and editors defended the practice. One travel writer who participated in the Colorado program told Franz her paper pays her “between $250-$300 per travel feature” so “it’s not financially feasible to visit multiple destinations throughout the year traveling with a family.” More:

She added that she views travel writing as different from investigative reporting and other beats, and she thought the investigation into Colorado’s journalist hosting program was a “non-story.”

But it looks like the “non-story” appears to have, in Franz’s words, “put the future of an unpublished story resulting from Colorado’s journalist hosting program in doubt.” He reported how one executive editor’s “statement against reimbursements” suggests a story in the works “may not be published in the newspaper as planned.” And some already published stories are now sporting disclosures, like one reading: “This article was partially underwritten with funding from the Colorado Tourism Office.”

More from KUNC:

The state tourism office said Colorado has hosted about a dozen journalists since the start of the pandemic, and the trips are important because they are part of an effort to boost the tourism economy. The state declined to provide a full list of the journalists they have hosted since February. It also said it would cost $606.25 to do the research to fulfill an open records request seeking all of the invoices for those dozen trips. They provided three itineraries and invoices at a cost of $6. They said they host up to 50 journalists per year.

Around this time last year, Mike Rispoli of the national group Free Press was in Colorado speaking on a panel I moderated at CU Denver about public support for the local news. At the end, he spoke about how he’d helped successfully advocate for a public media fund in New Jersey and what he learned from it. He wrapped up the panel with advice for Coloradans: “Don’t listen to the haters,” he said.

I reached out to Mike on Thursday asking whether this type of tourism program for out-of-state local journalists is the kind of thing he was hoping for when he urged Coloradans to think seriously about new ways in which state and local governments could help support the local news business. “Wow,” he responded. “No.”

So how did Franz get this story, anyway? Good old fashioned digging.

“In my downtime between calling sources, I often scroll through the state’s online checkbook to see what our government is spending money on each week,” Franz told me. “I most frequently look through the governor’s office expenses.” In August, Franz noticed a $2,000 payment from the state tourism office to a freelance journalist from Austin, Texas. “I found the journalists’ public Instagram feed and noticed she was recently in Breckenridge and other Colorado cities right before this payment occurred,” he says. “So I reached out to the Tourism Office and submitted a records request on the specific transaction.”

He found the payment was part of a so-called journalist hosting program the state of Colorado has run for years. As he dug more, he found stories published in The Houston Chronicle and Austin American Statesman with, what he called “positive write ups about traveling to Colorado during the pandemic.” Names of the authors were also showing up in Colorado’s online checkbook as receiving payments from the tourism office.

“I reached out to the journalists first, then their editors after the journalists didn’t agree to interviews,” Franz says. “None of the stories had disclosures about Colorado’s reimbursements when I reached out to the journalists and editors to ask about the practice, and the online checkbook was the only way me or the public could see that Colorado paid out the travel expenses and provided hour-by-hour itineraries. It was my first big investigative piece for KUNC.”

Read his whole story here.

The Denver Post ordered bulletproof vests ‘in anticipation of increased violence’ 

In Denver, 9News and Denver7 acknowledged in statements after the shooting that they hire security guards and request that they be unarmed. Fox31 Vice President and General Manager Byron Grandy and CBS Denver News Director Tim Wieland would not discuss whether their stations provided bodyguards to journalists while covering local news. Colorado Public Radio and its online news site, Denverite, have not, said Kevin Dale, CPR’s executive editor. The Denver Post has not hired private security for its journalists.

In the Denver area, journalists have worn reflective vests, goggles and helmets during protests where police have fired tear gas and other projectiles, and where protesters have fired guns and exchanged punches. After the Oct. 10 shooting, CPR ordered ballistic vests, Dale said. The Denver Post already had placed an order out in anticipation of increased violence.

More Colorado local media odds & ends

Colorado Sun reporter Jesse Paul published an analysis in The Washington Post’s Opinion section under the headline “It looks like antipathy to Trump has flipped the Colorado Senate race,” essentially writing off Cory Gardner.
Former Daily Camera editor Charlie Brennan co-bylined a piece in The New York Times about the Boulder-area wildfire.
The Denver Post published a guest column by a former state GOP spokesman who speculated anchor Kyle Clark could “drown 9News” in the wake of a fatal shooting by one of the station’s security guards.
Asking for a friend: “Why on earth would a flack for [a] statewide candidate be picking a public fight with [a] Denver Post reporter?”
Gavin Dahl is moving up to news director at KVNF.
Lauren Boebert, a candidate for Congress in Colorado, said: “I have gotten a proctology exam from the media.”
City Cast, led by David Plotz, will be “a network of daily, local news podcasts in cities around the country, launching in a handful of places this winter.” Will we see one in Colorado? (If so, just please not Denver.)
A “collaborative story between Colorado Politics and MetroWest Newspapers” by reporters Michael Karlik and Liam Adams exposes the secrecy surrounding judicial retention in Colorado.
The New York Times reports the Colorado Secretary of State’s office will “buy Google ads against relevant search terms whenever a piece of misinformation begins to gain attention in an effort to help slow its spread.”
Ark Valley Voice has been named “a 2020 #newsCOneeds Matching Grant Recipient.”
The Colorado Independent and Rio Blanco Herald Times won 2020’s Local Independent Online News publishers award for Investigative Report of the Year for their series “Through the Cracks.”
When a weekly newspaper makes the wrong endorsement by mistake in print.
Denver Post photographer Helen Richardson, who took those astonishing photos of the Denver shooting, told the NPAA she missed other protest assignments this year because she was furloughed.
A Colorado reporter spent seven months haggling with the state Department of Labor over his furlough weeks. (“I won’t see a penny of unemployment for my spring and summer furloughs. “You didn’t request,” they said (I did). Now starting appeals.”)
A former Colorado reporter explains why she recently quit as editor of a Lee Enterprises newspaper in Montana.
Info from public records requests for notes a university trustee took led to a wild must-read story by Elizabeth Hernandez in The Denver Post about some regents and CU’s former president.
Nancy Watzman writes in the Sun how the Denver protest shooting was “a superspreader of online misinformation” while one reporter notes that “one of the biggest, earliest pieces of misinformation about the shooting came from the most traditional news source around.”

A new digital site that’s recruiting freelance journalists and looking to become a “national alt-weekly” is co-owned by a former Colorado journalist-turned cannabis PR guy.

The News Station, whose managing editor Matt Laslo, a D.C-based journalist who put out a call for new writers this week, is a recently expanded and spun-off national project co-owned by Peter Marcus of Arvada. A former reporter for The Durango Herald and Colorado Politics, Marcus left journalism in 2017 to become director of communications for the privately-owned Terrapin Care Station, one of the few Colorado-based Multi State Operators in the cannabis industry.

Quitting journalism cold turkey, though, can make for a difficult transition for newly minted flaks. So Marcus created something for Terrapin called The News Station where he could continue to do some writing from behind industry lines.

Eventually, he realized he didn’t have the capacity to run a site with original content along with his other duties, and when the pandemic hit he saw plenty of journalists looking for work. He and Terrapin Care Station CEO and founder Chris Woods hashed out whether they might be able to put some resources behind the project on a bigger scale. The pair created a separate LLC for The News Station, Marcus says, and spun it off from their cannabis company as a standalone news site. They hired Laslo to run the editorial department after meeting him last year when he was in Colorado reporting a profile of Cory Gardner for Playboy.

“He’s getting into issues related to cannabis and drug policy reform and other things that other outlets are not looking into,” Marcus says of his managing editor, while also talking up the site’s culture, music, and lifestyle coverage. “Getting into the weeds so to speak.”

Laslo, who teaches journalism and reports for public radio and publications like Rolling Stone, Wired, and VICE News Tonight, is looking to build a stable of contributors across the country— established and not-yet established. He’s already wrangled well-known national journalists like Ben Jacobs while also trying to cultivate young talent and fresh voices. He recently published a piece by an incarcerated writer and is looking to partner with Street Sense to publish writers who are experiencing homelessness. He wants to help college students hone their skills and notch some clips. Students from Appalachian State University​, the University of Maryland College Park, and Macalester College have picked up bylines.

“We’re not really planning on having a staff, per se,” Laslo says about the site. “It’s going to be a lot of relying on freelancers.” He says he negotiates rates with contributors.

Have you seen our work? I've published former Vice News colleagues, Guardian reporters, Playboy correspondents, NYT contributors, CNN, Yahoo, local alt-weekly contributors, etc. And yeah – they've said it's worth their time. I'd love an email from you mlaslo@thenewsstation.com

— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) November 11, 2020

The News Station, a for-profit publication with a goal of eventually making money — Marcus says they aren’t thinking about how just yet — is another example of the ways in which those in a cash-flush industry are moving into the media space amid a disorienting breach in journalism’s traditional business model. Readers should, of course, take The News Station’s ties to the industry into consideration. These days, ownership structures of news and information outlets are coming under scrutiny as hard-to-decipher sites proliferate on the Internet. The site’s coverage ambitions, however, are broader than just cannabis and the site seeks to offer non-daily in-depth reporting in the style of city alt-weeklies that are disappearing across the country.

“We’re not a pro-cannabis site, we’re not a pro-drug site,” Laslo says, adding that he has editorial independence, and also that he has his own perspectives about drug policy. Readers aren’t likely to find much skepticism about legalization, and they’re likely to get insights about the War on Drugs from a standpoint of how it’s failing. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the site covers legitimate public health concerns about cannabis. A “Fake News” vertical on the site publishes items Laslo says are dedicated to debunking myths.

​There’s a lot of new money in the growing cannabis world, and legalization is spreading among the states. Four of them — Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Montana — this month passed laws allowing cannabis possession, while in the latest election voters in South Dakota and Mississippi cast ballots in favor of medical marijuana. That means 36 states currently allow medical cannabis and 15 states allow recreational. (Disclosure: I own two cannabis stocks that are currently valued at less than $1,000.)

Marcus acknowledges how money from cannabis legalization allowed for The News Station’s ambitions. “If I worked for Chris in another industry he probably would have been interested in it just as much— we just happen to be in cannabis,” Marcus told me. “The cannabis industry has more flexibility to be working on projects such as this because of the success of the industry.”

A few years ago, when The Denver Post’s pioneering cannabis editor Ricardo Baca left the paper and tried unsuccessfully to buy The Cannabist vertical from the newspaper’s owner, he says he’d sought funding from two very different potential sources. One was from an entity involved in the cannabis industry and one had no ties to it. Baca, who now runs Grasslands, a “journalism-minded” PR agency, says whichever one wound up funding the outlet would have “undeniably” had an impact on what the site covered. He says he’s thought about that he has watched The News Station grow, and notes that as cannabis has become more normalized in Colorado and throughout the nation he’s seen a growing media hole to fill about drug policy and cannabis coverage.

As for recent content, The News Station, which Laslo says will be getting a site upgrade, has produced features about domestic extremism, efforts to end cash bail, the ways in which Trump, Congress and COVID-19 are “screwing artists,” drug decriminalization movements, and a look at Kamala Harris’s complicated criminal justice record, among plenty of others. A former fellow at the conservative Weekly Standard is a contributor, and Laslo says he might even run an op-ed by Roger Stone.

Stories have carried datelines from Alabama, Minnesota, Oregon, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. “I fully believe that local reporters on the ground tell the story better than those in New York, people here in D.C, and people in LA,” says Laslo, who sits on the board of the Regional Reporters Association. Writers with ties to Colorado already include Leland Rucker of Boulder and 5280 intern Hannah Farrow. Rucker published a piece this week about how legalization advocates fear former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper’s anti-marijuana past now that he’s a U.S. Senator.

As for the site’s tagline as the nation’s alt-weekly, Laslo says, “For me what alt-weeklies do best is capture the essence and heart of their towns. And so what we want to do is assist them in that goal with providing national coverage.”

Colorado Springs TV anchor with the ‘rona says symptoms are like ‘standing atop a 14er’ 

My symptoms started to appear as pure exhaustion, which I attributed to stress. But then, the night of the election, I just couldn’t warm up (which I thought was due to spending extended time in our usually-cold studio.  Feeling chilled after a show isn’t anything out of the norm). I was then informed Tuesday, in the middle of election coverage, that someone I had direct contact with had COVID. I left before the 10 o’clock show and have been home since.

Newspaper vs. town over the legality of a meeting

The town of Breckenridge has released a recording from a Breckenridge Town Council executive session held illegally Tuesday, Nov. 3, regarding a transit center and workforce housing project proposal by Breckenridge Grand Vacations.

The town of Breckenridge disputes the fact that the meeting was held illegally.

At the public portion of the meeting, Breckenridge Grand Vacations CEO and co-owner Mike Dudick proposed partnering with the town to move the transit center near the Watson Street roundabout and Park Avenue on land that he would provide for free. Workforce housing units on the Gold Rush lot also were proposed. Council members then asked questions about the proposal before going into executive session, where the project was discussed privately among council members and staff. Immediately following the executive session, Mayor Eric Mamula said the council decided it would not be interested in either the transit center or workforce housing proposals.

While entering an executive session to discuss negotiations is allowed, Colorado Open Meetings Law permits only limited discussion as it pertains to negotiations and prohibits any type of decision-making, informal or otherwise.

Zansberg said Monday that the decision to not move forward with the proposal should have been deliberated publicly because an open discussion would allow the public to understand why the decision was made. He noted that the town essentially adopted a position on the proposals, which is not allowed in an executive session.

Local media call out Colorado’s COVID-19 secrecy

Colorado’s health department has routinely deleted emails sent and received by officials responding to the coronavirus pandemic, despite a request by the state archives that agencies save all documents related to their management of the historic public health crisis. The Denver Post discovered the Department of Public Health and Environment deleted public records after requesting emails sent and received by state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy. Emails belonging to state employees are public records under the Colorado Open Records Act.

The Tribune is not trying to out sick people, nor could it possibly, even with the information withheld from its reporters by the public institutions that steward them. So why was it so hard to get simple information on reports that are created for the express purpose of transparency and openness in administration?

“This lack of transparency is nothing new for Colorado government,” said one Denver Post editor pointing to some of the paper’s previous reporting.

This lack of transparency is nothing new for Colorado government. As @alex_burness reported last, most state departments purge emails — which are public records — after 30, 60 or 90 days. https://t.co/DYhxS7u8HZ

— Matt Sebastian (@mattsebastian) November 11, 2020

Journalism educator spotlight: Kristi Rathbun

An advisor to Rockmedia, which includes the Black & Gold yearbook, Rockmediaonline.org, and The Rock newspaper at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, the Douglas County teacher is one of this year’s four National Scholastic Press Association Pioneer Award recipients.

From the NSPA:

A former Colorado Journalism Education Association state director, she received a JEA Medal of Merit in 2007. She was CSMA Adviser of the year in 2012, JEA Distinguished Adviser in 2014 and received a CSPA Gold Key in 2016. She has served on the CSMA board since 1998, working to help advisers, students and media programs throughout Colorado.

Her primary goal is to empower others to create valuable publications and media outlets for their school communities through continued education, student and adviser advocacy and opportunities to hone media skills — regardless of their level of experience or location in the state or country.

More Colorado local media odds & ends

”About 500 people are taking buyouts” at Gannett, the giant newspaper chain that owns The Coloradoan in Fort Collins and The Pueblo Chieftain.
One of Colorado’s “most unsung heroes” is the “hero” of a Netflix miniseries.
The Colorado Sun reported how “More than a dozen agencies, organizations and even competitors came together one weekend to make sure the internet would not go out as the Cameron Peak fire inched closer.”
When Republican lawmakers didn’t wear masks at work, a Denver Post reporter wrote “Capitol press corps reporters shouldn’t have to risk their health just to cover a caucus meeting.”
KKTV evening anchor Dianne Derby resigned from the station after nine years at the desk in Colorado Springs. (The move comes after Adam Atchison took over following the August death of anchor Don Ward.)
The Public Relations Society of America named CPR’s Vic Vela its Media Person of the Year.
Are any Colorado newspapers re-thinking how they handle obituaries?
​The Colorado Sun reports: “Steamboat Powdercats has sued a former employee, Stephen Bass, to stop his book from hitting shelves.”
KRDO says when it asked Colorado Interactive what it does with Coloradans’ personal information, “Colorado Interactive sent us in a circle.”
The Colorado College COVID-19 Reporting Project made the front page of The Gazette.
Our neighbor Oklahoma is benefiting from “an ambitious program that expands legal support for local news.”
KUNC is looking for a producer for Colorado Edition ($49,200-$51,600). Vail Daily wants a reporter.
David Olinger wrote in The Gazette about a hate crime in Lakewood: “An international flurry of news followed the hate crime announcement, from the West Coast weekly India-west to television networks, the Associated Press and Colorado papers. Then, silence. The media had moved on.”
Law professor Eugene Volokh called a Denver Post editorial “odd” in a Reason headline.
The Open Media Foundation is looking for a Radio Operations Director ($45,000 to $55,000).
The Mountain Gazette partnered with Alibi Ale Works for a “Your Dad’s Beer” pilsner that “celebrates the rebirth of the Mountain Gazette with Issue 194 on November 16.”
Colorado Watch is “dedicated to uncovering the truth, wherever it may lead, through investigative journalism.”
Denver’s 5280 magazine is looking for a senior editor ($65,000). Westword wants a news editor.
The Sun learned Moffat County’s “human services director — who oversaw the department and its child welfare division since early 2019 — left the position the day after The Sun published its story exposing the fraudulent casework.”
Susan Gonzalez, Social Media Strategist at Chalkbeat, who lives in Denver, was elected to the Online News Association’s board of directors. The ONA announcement says she “brings expertise in audience engagement and a passion for supporting underrepresented voices in the journalism industry.”
A Gazette guest columnist wrote a paean to local radio, saying: “Colorado Springs remains home to a slate of vibrant radio stations appealing to almost every possible taste in news, music, sports, faith and political talk.”
The Colorado Springs Independent’s editorial board asks: “After all the lies, the distortions, the malicious fantasies of the Trump years, how do we resurrect reality and reclaim our nation’s sanity?”